Dangerous Game
by Helen1969
Summary: A dangerous smuggling ring is operating in Harlock's territory, and he isn't happy - especially given their other sideline... Happily for him he does have his No. 1 crewman - the ever helpful, brilliant, brave, intelligent, sexy-as-all-hell Ali to back him up. And to tell everyone about it. At length. Whether you want him to or not... (CGI verse, a couple of years after Red Shift)
1. Chapter 1

It's Leiji-san's 80th Birthday today - 誕生日おめでとう!

* * *

 _Game: (definition)_

 _An activity engaged in for diversion or amusement_

 _a procedure or strategy for gaining an end_

 _an illegal or shady activity_

 _a physical or mental competition conducted according to rules with the participants in direct opposition to each other_

 _animals under pursuit or taken in hunting_

 _archaic: Plucky._

 _a target or object especially of ridicule or attack_

 _...or all of the above…_

* * *

'There are some things,' I hissed at the captain, 'that once this is over I think we should never, _ever_ speak of again…'

Given that we were standing next to a mahogany veneered platform doubling as an auction block, in a group of nearly thirty young, attractive men and women all dressed in skimpy gold satin loincloths and lightly oiled to enhance their physique under the spotlights, for the delectation and delight of a select audience of depraved Machinner aristos, I felt I had a point. Given that in order to get here I'd had the captain's tongue down my throat pressed up against the wall in a stinking alleyway whilst being tracked down by a bunch of goons rounding up people on the streets of Metabloody in the wee small hours, I felt I had a _serious_ point.

'Adjust your dress, Ali,' he whispered back in that annoying, calm manner he adopts when everything goes pear shaped and the rest of us are staring certain death in the face and trying not to shit ourselves. 'Your loincloth's coming undone.'

I fumbled with the ties on my hip and hoped it was the heat from the lights, not me blushing that made me feel so damn hot. Then we were being prodded forwards and up the steps into pride of place by a couple of dial-heads and it was our turn to be paraded for the pleasure of the highest bidder.

I wondered glumly as a draught blew up my exposed arse just how much worse this day was gonna get.

Somedays I should just stop thinking.

* * *

 _24 hours earlier…_

'I don't know why we didn't just come in mob-handed, shoot the place up and just put a stop to this,' I said over a tankard of stale beer that smelled - and tasted, as though it had been freshly casked from the urinal.

Well… it was brewed on site, according to the sign hand scrawled across the bar, and the vats - which had probably been gleaming and pristine before the Homecoming War - listed in rusting splendour against the wall under the stairs which led to the bathroom facilities.

Nah. Best not to think about it… Besides, the captain was talking, and I'd missed the first bit.

'... subtle. Besides, I want to roll this organisation up, and this guy isn't the boss. That's the one I want - the bastard in charge of this ring, Ali.' Harlock took a swing from his pint and grimaced, manfully swallowing and managing to keep it down. 'It's taken us six months just to track this operation to Metabloody, and we finally have a line on part of the supply chain.'

I took another swig of swill. After half a tankard it didn't actually taste too bad. But the numb feeling in my tongue probably had something to do with that. 'So when do we stick our heads in the noose?'

I looked around at the rest of the clientele - at this time of the night the place was almost empty. In this part of town the bars didn't start filling up until the reputable places started kicking out. Our only company consisted of a couple of spacers who looked even scruffier than we did, and a run-down dial-head nursing an oily-looking drink that it sipped at even less enthusiastically than we were drinking our beer. Like most cheaper-end body-types it consisted of spindly limbs, an oval face topped with a single gauge-type "eye" (from where they got their nickname) and a small opening where the mouth would be on a human face. Despite the major programme only having been rolled out less than ten years ago, this lube-job was already looking worse for wear - the chassis was dented in several places and one of its fingers was missing on the hand gripping the glass. Its listless demeanor wasn't totally due to the ennui that plagued the poor bastards who fell for the sales pitch: it was probably low on energy capsules to boot.

'A foot-soldier,' Harlock added out of the blue, noticing my interest. 'Most of that damage is from weapons fire. They don't bother repairing them past a certain point - it's more economic just to cut them loose and recruit newer models.'

I pulled a face, and not just because of the beer. 'And we all know there's no shortage of stupid lined up to take their places.' I watched as the machinner lurched out of its seat and limped to the swinging half-doors. 'But it ain't the stupid footsloggers we'll be going up against, is it, capn'? I still think we need more back-up.'

'Relax.' He stuck his boots up on a nearby chair and crossed his ankles - a damn stupid pose if you ask me coz it's awkward to get to your feet in a hurry. But he does like to act all cool and tough like. 'Between Yattaran, Doc and Maji's mad skills - with a bit of help from Tochiro, I've got this covered. And I have you for the heavy lifting and your particular skill set…'

'Huh. Coz _that's_ never gone wrong before… Kei's gonna kill me if anything happens to you, you do know that, right?' If I was lucky… if not I'd lose parts of my anatomy I - and several ladies of my acquaintance that my gentlemanly manners prevent me from naming - are particularly fond of.

'I'm not saying it will be easy,' he continued, doing his best soothing voice. 'After all - we've got to get ourselves captured, and then persuade a bunch of rich, entitled, depraved murdering cyborgs that the two of us will make great fodder for their sick little games so that we can roll up this smuggling ring.'

I just looked at him. Really looked. As in top to toe. Him - yeah. He would scrape through - Doc had done a great job with some latex and you couldn't see the scars on his face at all. Even the tiny little dark burns under his right eye - usually hidden by his patch - were invisible. And she'd even conjured up a contact lens to disguise the fact that his right eye didn't work too well - the lens would react to light to darken and lighten to hide that fact that the pupil that side didn't contract or dilate. And no-one could claim our captain wasn't damn fine to look at, if you like the type. Doc had also neatened his usually shaggy mop up a bit and even though we were rocking the down-at-heel spacer look, it just made him look a bit like a slumming rock star.

Me, on the other hand… well, I was a good ten years older, packing a few extra pounds than was probably good for me thanks to Anita's skills in the kitchen, and I'd been battered on the rocks a bit over the years. Literally, on a few occasions. There was grey in my golden locks (especially my sideburns, which are my pride and joy) that hadn't been there when Harlock had taken over as captain some years back, and no-one had seemed bothered about hiding _my_ scars from view (including a nasty one above one eye that had come within an inch or two of putting _me_ in the market for a natty line in eye-patches as well.)

I've been around the block a few times, and it shows. So I said so. Repeatedly. Pointedly. All the way from where we left the Arcadia and I was still saying it when we left the bar half an hour later to start cruising the mean streets of the seedier parts of Metabloody's capital looking for trouble of a particular kind and trying to stay out of the rest that the city had to offer. And all I could get from the smug little git was "trust me - I've done my homework".

'And you don't think sharing would be a good idea?' I asked as I scooted around a puddle that had some regretfully identifiable lumps floating in it. 'Gaia. This place is a sewer… have they not heard of sanitation?'

'The infrastructure was built before the War,' he replied glibly as we strolled, a couple of down-at-heel swells looking to live the low life for the night. 'Up where the high-rise bright lights burn, the city doesn't need it - the population is now mostly machinner. Down here, it's just naturals, and no-one cares.'

'You didn't answer the question,' I pointed out in my best reasonable tone. Honestly, he'd try the patience of a saint, that man. I threw my most dazzling smile at a red-head lurking under a flickering street light. 'Hey, kitten - lousy night to be working.'

She smiled back and tugged at her skirt, if you could call it that - it barely covered her ass and the low cut clinging tank top she wore did nothing to disguise a pair of tits that were pointing out the falling temperature to anyone who was interested. It had been drizzling for at least the last half hour and her long red hair was looking a little bedraggled. She wasn't much shorter than me, and her legs just went on forever.

'If you're not buying, sugar, maybe you should move on,' I was told in a sultry accent that went through me like warm honey.

I leered. 'Who says I ain't buying, sweetheart?'

The captain's hand on my collar, that's who. He had me dragged around the corner accompanied by a peal of laughter from the long-legged lovely. Damn… some days life ain't fair, I thought. She's half my age, and I'm no cradle snatcher.

Plus I like my nads where they are and she's a dab hand with a blade, is our little Em.

'Keep focussed,' Harlock advised sweetly once we were round the corner. I gave him the stink-eye behind his back.

'You know, you can play things _too_ close to the chest,' I grumbled at him. 'Why…?'

He waved a small piece of paper at me. 'If you'd been paying a bit more attention to what's going off around you, and a bit less to tits and ass, you'd have noticed the hand-off.'

'Huh. How long's _she_ been on the planet?'

'Who do you think has been working this end for us?' He stopped under another stuttering light so he could read the note she'd passed to him. 'We're a few streets too far south. Step up the pace a bit, Ali - the snatch squads are operating north of the river tonight.'

'Great,' I mumbled, as I trotted after him. 'My feet are already killing me.'

'Shouldn't have worn the high heels then,' floated back the snarky bastard's response.

I would have flipped him the finger behind his back, but my hands were busy pulling up my collar in a vain attempt to stop any more rain from running down my back into my butt crack.

Without much luck. I squelched along in my captain's wake in soggy boxers longing for dry clothing and a nice warm bed. None of which were in my near future, unless I missed my guess.


	2. Chapter 2

_There is no hunting like the hunting of man, and those who have hunted armed men long enough and liked it, never care for anything else thereafter._

 _Hemingway_

* * *

The rain had stopped by the time we'd crossed over the bridge. The lights were out in the area, and we were making our way via the light of the two largest moons. I sniffed the air as we walked across the rickety structure and regretted it instantly. The metallic tang of the water mixed with the delightful scent of ammonia - seems the bridge did double duty as a latrine and not everyone using it aimed over the parapet. It also creaked and swayed ominously, the stressed metal protesting in the wind that whistled right up from the estuary. Damn thing was probably at least five hundred years old, and knowing what I did about metallurgy and how steel reacts with the acidity of the water on this planet I scuttled across like my feet were on fire. The captain followed at a more leisurely pace. I dunno - kid must have cast-iron nostrils. And more faith in ancient engineering than I have.

The shit weather meant that we passed very few people as we walked. Music and the occasional staggering drunk spilled out of the bars and fast food outlets we passed along the way, but the streets were mostly empty. Even the whores had taken the night off. Can't say I blamed 'em - on a night like this, business would be slow - no point selling when no-one's buying. Though we did pass one girl - whip-thin with cheekbones you could slice paper with, all legs and arms, no more than fifteen and wearing a skimpy top and tiny skirt that were already soaked through. Captain took two paces past her then turned back. I waited.

Sure enough, he had a little chat, and pressed something into her hand. She took off clutching a bunch of credit chips in cold fingers with a wondering look back over her shoulder just before she ducked into the doorway of an all night cafe. 'You're a sucker,' I told him when he reached me again. 'She'll probably spend it on drugs. Or booze. Or drugs and booze. Or her pimp'll just take it…'

'She just ran into a cafe for a hot drink and a sandwich, unless I lost the sight in both eyes,' he snapped back at me. 'Do you have to be so damn negative?'

I shrugged. 'You can't save em all, Harlock.'

'Doesn't mean I can't try,' he shot back.

Yeah. He's like that. It's one reason why - in spite of my excellent and _much_ better judgement and greater experience, I agreed to have his back on this one.

Unlike our last captain, he's not immortal. But he takes risks as though he is. Like now: we were wandering around the worst parts of a sprawling metropolis at midnight in shitty weather, trying to get ourselves swept up by a bunch of goons who we had good intel would be trawling for the unwanted (and unmissed) for a spectacle to provide entertainment for a bunch of bored mechas who needed cheap, savage thrills to make their mechanical hearts pump a bit faster to make up for their lost - or more accurately "disposed of" humanity.

Luckily we saw them before they saw us.

* * *

There were five of em - prodding a group of people in front of em into a large hover-van. Young and pretty, under the dirt, at a guess. Well - most of them. The outlier was an older man, scarred and bearded, and fighting all the way. Tough bastard too: it took two dial-heads to sit on him whilst a third shot him up with something and he went limp.

'Our source was right,' the captain whispered into my ear. His hair tickled it and I swatted him away like the irritating fly that he is. 'It's not just the pretty ones.'

I grunted. Yeah… and that spooked me more than them rounding up pretty young things for sport. Someone in this liked big game, and I didn't like the things that conjured up in my head. 'They want entertainment - that guy looks as though he'll put up a fight. So are we still playing this the way we discussed? Coz I'm not keen on either of us getting tranked.'

He placed a hand on my shoulder. 'Me neither. It'd put a crimp in things. But they just caught one tough guy. If I'm right in reading the machinner behind this, he's after novelty as well as decoration. We need to get their attention and hold their interest. I have a plan…'

'When you say it like that,' I whispered back, 'I just know I ain't gonna like it…' I grinned. 'Hey - maybe you could be my toy-boy - it's worked before…'

His answering grin was so damned self-satisfied, I should have known he'd got something up his sleeve. 'They're locking up and moving out for another sweep - are you ready to be live bait, Ali?'

No. But we were committed now. 'I think I've been wriggling on your hook since we first heard about this operation,' I told him quietly. 'Less talk, more action.'

We stepped out of hiding into the line of sight of the goon squad - four machinners - not your basic dial-heads, but not high-end nano-forms either. They looked vaguely human, but fell into the uncanny valley with their too-perfect features and slightly unresponsive body language. Almost, but not quite, and just off enough to make your skin crawl. They were about a hundred yards away as we walked towards them, laughing and staggering just enough to give the impression of a couple of guys who'd had a few too many. When it was obvious they'd seen us and were looking us over, the captain leaned closer to me as though whispering something in my ear, and tugged me into the next side street. 'Laugh, and call me a crazy bastard,' he said softly. 'Loudly.' And then he shoved me up against the wall.

'You crazy son of a bitch!' I didn't have to fake the annoyance but I did put the laugh on a bit thick. 'What the hell do you think you're doing? This place stinks like a urinal.'

'What - you don't fancy a bit of adventure?' He was louder than I'm used to from him - he's a quiet guy normally. He slurred his words just enough to give some weight to the picture he wanted the goon squad to hear: slightly pissed and taking chances. Booted footsteps were almost on top of us, and I broke out into a cold sweat, coz - and this was the bit I was really having kittens about - we were in disguise, and so no cosmo dragoons. Just ordinary standard ex-military blasters that would do fuck all against dial-heads. 'Oh - and Ali - whatever happens next, follow my lead and sell it like your life depends on it,' he whispered fiercely into my ear.

And then the sneaky bastard kissed me.

And when I say "kissed", I wish I just meant a quick peck on the cheek or a brush of lips. Hell - I've snogged guys before. Kind of happens when you've had a skinful and… yeah. Well, I've led an adventurous life. Hell, some planets the nights are cold, dark and long, women in short supply and one mouth on your cock feels like any other.

Beard rash is a bitch though.

But noooo - the skinny bastard had me pinned up against the wall - which, by the way did indeed smell as though it had been used as an outdoor toilet for a couple of hundred years - my boots were slipping in something slimy underfoot, my captain had his fingers in my hair, his other hand on my ass and his tongue was heading down my throat.

Oh… I got his play all right. Tosser. Could have warned me. But I had no option but to hold on for dear life (so to speak), close my eyes, and think of Luna.

Yeah. Not my best idea. For one thing who knew my captain was a better kisser than my gal? (You want unlikely? I always preferred my lasses with a bit of… youth. And meat on their bones. Nice helpings of everything - double portions of tits, hold the brains. So why I frequently bunk with our ship's doctor, who's not far off my age, bony, with little handfuls, a snarky line in sarcasm with a bedside manner that could make grown pirates cry for their mommas and a dreadful lush to boot remains a mystery… Including to both the participants. Though she can deliver a back rub that turns me into putty in her hands. Apart from the bits that _shouldn't_ be soft and floppy, that is.)

And if the night couldn't get any worse, I had to shift to the side a bit. There's nothing more mortifying than being snogged by your captain in a dark, dank alley with an audience - unless it's the very real fear that he'll notice the boner poking into his crotch.

Not that it lasted too long - there's nothing like having the business end of a pistol pressed against your head to put the damper on the proceedings.

* * *

We put up enough of a fight to make it look as though we knew how to handle ourselves, but not enough to earn a tranking or to show off how good our ripping-heads-off-machine-men techniques (honed over seven years or so of practice) were. So we were soon forced to our knees on the slimy pavement (and yes, it did smell much worse than it felt when it was only three feet away from my nose) with our hands zip-tied behind our backs. The bastards used thumb-ties to boot, making it that much harder to work free, even if we'd wanted to. We were quickly divested of all obvious weapons, including our boot-concealed hold-outs, and a small pile of three pistols, six knives and a knuckle duster soon lay in the muck. I was so glad at that point to have been talked out of bringing my favourites along.

'What the hell do you think you're doing?' Harlock snarled at one of them. 'We're not doing anything illegal.'

'Well, not on this planet,' I couldn't resist adding. 'Ya just ruined what was shaping up to be an interesting evening. What are ya? Cops?'

'Not police,' Harlock replied softly. 'They don't come down here at night.'

The exchange earned us both a short, sharp tug on our bonds, enough to cause a lot of pain to already strained shoulder joints. I hissed out a few words Mama Jones would have washed my mouth out with soap for using, and even the captain didn't hold back a pithy cuss.

One of our captors shone a light into our faces and I longed to slam the damn thing into his non-face. 'Maybe we should throw these two back,' he said, addressing the one who hadn't taken part in the scuffle. How to Spot the boss: 101. 'Just a couple of drunken fags - lowlife spacer trash. We might use the younger one, but the old one isn't really worth the effort.'

Old? I was going to rip that little shit's wires out when I got loose...

Boss peered at us. 'I'm not so sure. His Grace might find the dynamic interesting… Beauty and the Beast?' The others laughed, in that hollow way they have. 'I'd have expected to find this brute as the dominant… but there's potential in the pairing. And Beauty here is no lowlife.' He pulled the captain's hair so hard he almost slammed the back of his head into his shoulder blades. 'I know educated, entitled, Martian diction when I hear it. It's the way they pronounce their vowels…'

'Told you that you still sound like a posh tart, you daft kid,' I growled at my captain. 'No grime covers up that posh education you walked away from, lover.'

Boss let go of Harlock's hair and turned his glowing eyes on me, missing the savage glare Harlock gave him. 'You have no room to talk, blondie. You've spent more time in low company than your better half here, but I detect an accent in there that's pure New Macedonia, and that's an academic planet. I suspect neither of you is what you pretend to be - which makes me wonder about your performance just now.' It made a noise that might have been a snigger. 'But no matter - you'll still make an interesting diorama when stuffed and mounted…'

I was hauled to my feet next to the captain. 'I really hope he doesn't mean that literally,' I muttered when Boss had walked off giving orders. 'The idea of spending eternity with your cock in my ass doesn't fill me with joy.'

Beat.

'That came out wrong,' I added.

'No shit,' was the laconic reply out of the corner of his mouth. I had to bite my tongue to stop myself from rising to _that_ line.

We weren't moving fast enough for our captors, apparently, because we both earned jabs with pistol muzzles in the small of the back to help us pick up the pace. Like the kids we'd seen earlier, we were bundled into the back of a black hover-van, already crowded with waifs and strays. And once locked in the darkness surrounded by sniffling dregs of humanity, it hit me hard that we were utterly alone in this, if it went tits-up.

And long experience had taught me that it wasn't a matter of "if". More "when".

The hover-van lifted, and we were on our way.


	3. Chapter 3

We were hauled out of the transport in the courtyard of some monstrosity of a mansion - one of several I knew from the briefing populated the countryside surrounding the city. Before the Machine Wars these had been owned by the elite.

Nothing had changed. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss - just in a new chassis. And a few nastier kinks on account of leaving your soul behind with your body.

The less said about the processing the better. By the time we were divested of our now soiled clothing and shoved into a communal shower with about fifty other people, I was getting sick and tired of being poked, prodded and pushed around by smug assholes with body-image issues. I also had screaming pins and needles in my thumbs and the whole thing was making me very cranky.

'Easy tiger,' the captain told me as we tried to get the smell of the alley out of our hair. 'There's a fine line here between "interesting" and "trouble". And trouble gets doped into the middle of next week and sits on a chair drooling onto his chest.' Water ran off his unmarked back down over a firm ass I eyed up with more envy than lust… under the guise of soaping off my stomach I prodded the softer muscle there, gave the muffin-top a pinch and reflected that twenty years ago, I could have given the kid a run for his money. And that maybe I should change to baggier sweaters...

'Never mind Ali,' he said without looking round. 'Doc tells me she likes something to hold onto in the clinches.'

I eyed him up, taking in the scars Doc _had_ left in place - the long surgical scar on his thigh was the only one I could see - he was being careful not to disturb her handiwork in his scrubbing, since his usual catalogue of weapon injuries would have been much harder to explain away in our cover roles than a couple of compound fractures. But if there was a flaw I could pick on to rub his perfect, aristocratic nose in, I couldn't see it.

'Maybe you should eat your veggies a bit more,' I sniped. 'Poor Kei must get prodded in some sensitive places by your skinny hips.' A couple of the young ladies in our group brushed past, there not being much room in the showers, and my most impressive attribute shot to attention just as Harlock turned around to wash his back off under the showerhead. The cocky bastard didn't even turn to watch the two curvy, gently swaying backsides sashay past and _his_ attribute didn't so much as twitch.

'You are just _sooo_ pussy-whipped,' I whispered into his ear.

I probably deserved the wet towel that smacked against my ass when I turned away from him, whistling.

* * *

I wasn't quite so smug when I held up the tiny little posing pouch and loincloth for inspection a few minutes later. 'Are they serious? We're supposed to wear _these_?'

The captain eyed his up with a wide, slightly wild eye. 'Well the ladies are in something similar…' he dangled the offending article between thumb and forefinger. 'Man up, Ali. I've seen you in less. A _lot_ less…' He pantomimed a shudder. Theatrical little prick.

'My boxers covered a damn sight more than this, and I was bleeding all over an asteroid at the time,' I shot back snarkily. 'Besides, _that's_ not my problem…'

He gave me one of his biggest theatrical sighs and leaned against the wall in that faux-casual way he has, arms folded across his chest, dangling that scrap of fabric so it hung down over his belly-button, waiting for the punchline. 'I know I'm going to regret asking but: go on…'

'I think this one is in your size - it's too small for me.'

I was treated to the long-suffering sigh this time.

* * *

 _Now…_

'The least they could do is turn on the heating,' I grumbled as they led us through the draughty pile towards the banqueting hall. We were somewhere in the middle of the gaggle of semi-naked prisoners, guards on every side, although the rest of the group were mostly too numb to pull anything. The couple of guys who did look as though they might be up for a rumble were bringing up the rear, under separate guard and in shackles.

'Machine bodies don't feel the cold. I'm just wondering if I should be pleased or peeved that we don't merit the extra precautions…'

'That's what you get for pulling that pretty-boy-top routine leaving me as the whimpering bottom,' I replied out of the corner of my mouth. 'And since when do _you_ whinge about us catching a break?'

'When I'm trying to take my mind off _that…'_

We were walking through the massive double doors - dark wood, two inches thick and ten feet tall (seriously - who needs to protect the roast turkey with that kind of home defence?). Whoever had owned - or still owned - this ancient heap had had a real hard-on for medieval architecture. We'd already walked down a corridor lined with the stuffed heads of various large animals, mostly with big horns. If you ask me that's some serious overcompensation.

Then I saw what the captain had seen. As I walked through the doorway, the banquet hall was laid out in all its fake splendor - a thirty foot ceiling arched over us, roofed with massive beams and lit with a dozen massive chandeliers. A dais at the far end dominated that part of the room, and the central area was filled with what must have been a half-a-dozen large banquet tables.

But it was the walls that grabbed the attention. Or rather, what was on them and in front of them.

The room was filled with trophies. Posed dioramas in glass cages lined the sides of the room, and other, partial items were displayed on the walls from the traditional wooden shields. Only these weren't animals.

They were all human.

Men were posed in various martial positions - either singly or in groups. One large case near the door contained two naked men wrestling each other. Another tall narrow case contained a guy dressed in the uniform of a Fleet captain from the time of the homecoming War, half kneeling, firing his pistol - the mass-produced version of the one the captain had been given by his predecessor

Creepily, another had been dressed and made up to look horribly familiar. Dark haired, one eyed, and dressed all in black with a long black cloak, some taxidermist's attempt to recreate the old Captain - standing at a replica ship's wheel - glared out over the dining tables.

'Too short,' I whispered hoarsely to my captain.

'Looks nothing like him,' he murmured back. I had to agree - the poor bastard posed for all to see as the Gaia Coalition's Most Wanted looked more like a dyspeptic accountant in fancy dress. And he was several pounds too heavy to carry off the look.

Other cases had mixed poses - naked or scantily dressed girls of all types posed in someone's sick idea of provocative allure; some alone, some in what I could only delicately refer to as _in congress_ \- and one or two positions were anatomically unlikely unless you wanted to pull something. I should know - I'd tried a couple in my time. The overall effect wasn't titillating. It was nauseating.

It was even worse, if that was possible, on the walls, where the trophies - heads, and heads and torsos - of several people - stared out over the room through glass eyes. One lovely young blonde woman was posed as though exiting the shield she was displayed on, her arms behind her, hands pushing against the wall, her lovely body brutally truncated at the pelvis, her head thrown back and her back arched in her moment of escape that would never come. Her long hair covered her breasts and moved eerily in the draft.

Some even had legends on plaques under them to denote (presumably) the date, place and sick bastard responsible for turning living, breathing vitality into a monster's sick display. I just didn't want to look closely enough to check my theory. I felt physically ill, and by the retching and crying and moaning around us, I wasn't the only one. Thankfully they hadn't fed us so the only thing I needed to swallow back down was a mouthful of bile. The guards had to move in to hustle their charges along - the horror of what they were in for had hit home hard and some had to be dragged towards the platform at the far end.

One of the idiots grabbed the captain's arm when he didn't move fast enough, and I only caught a brief glimpse of the look of tranquil fury on his face as he turned to glare at the moron who'd dared to lay a hand on him. The damn thing recoiled slightly, then raised a metal fist to take a swing at his face.

'Hold!'

The leader of the pack strode over and pulled his lackey's arm down. 'You know the rules - you don't mark the merchandise - bruises take a week or more to fade, and this one might bring a fair price.'

Instead we were pushed and shoved over to the far end, and that's where I was standing when our target made an appearance at last, with a cold draft heading right up into the unknown.

* * *

As the first victim was hauled up onto the block, I turned slightly to Harlock so we could talk quietly. 'I knew they were hunting people for sport, but I never guessed they were serious about that whole stuffing and mounting thing…'

'There were rumours,' he pointed out.

'Yeah - but I figured it was exaggeration - not… not _this…'_

'There was talk on the underground a few years back. Never found any proof until recently, when Emeraldas turned something up when she went after some associates of her mother. As it happens, Promethium does _not_ sanction this - it's illegal and strictly underground. After all - humans are either future citizens, or…' he nodded to where several only slightly less scantily clad men and women were serving the guests who'd started to arrive. The expensive crystal goblets they carried on their silver platters all held a glowing substance which hand wispy blue flames dancing through it. _The Flame of Life_ they called it - catnip for Machinners - the distilled life force of living beings. 'She hates waste.'

'That ain't much of an endorsement,' I told him pithily. We shared grim smiles, but had no time to exchange reminiscences regarding the evil bitch-queen of the Machinners - or as Emeraldas is forced to call her: "mum". There was a commotion near the stage, and two tall figures appeared from the wings. One was a tall human form machinner apart from his face - or more accurately, his head, which was a weird combination of human and dial-head, since his body was fully realistic, but his face was a standard single-gauge oval topped with very real-lookin' brown hair. He affected the dress of a pre-atomic age country squire - breeches tucked into knee boots and a frock coat - and a damn cravat tied into a natty waterfall. Seriously freaky. And from the way even the bossy goon deferred to him, probably the guy we'd come for.

The figure next to him was a total mystery - tall, and covered from head to foot in a long hooded mantle. From the glimpses I could see when he moved and the mantle swished open, he was human or human-form at least. Well built from the width of his shoulders, and he was light on his feet - moved gracefully and with little to no flourish. Restrained, was one word that came to mind. I couldn't see his face, covered as it was by the deep hood, and he took pains for some reason to stay out of the light.

Then we were up, being prodded towards the auction block, and I looked to Harlock for orders. He shook his head with the tiniest of motions. No action. I sighed inwardly. This hadn't been the plan, but then, we'd had no opportunity to get to our weapons and gear, since we hadn't been left alone since getting here. I could only hope Harlock knew what he was doing.

I had my foot on the first step, just ahead of the captain, when the hooded man leaned over to whisper something into the dial-headed chimera's ear. Dial-head raised a hand. 'Wait.' He called to our guard. 'Not these two - take them back to holding. They're to be reserved for Count Lazarus.'

'As you command, excellency,' the head goon bowed and jerked his head towards our guards, who pulled us both back and away from the stage. I looked back over my shoulder, to see the dark shape inside that hood staring straight at us, and although I could blame the cold drafty room and zero clothing, all of a sudden I got goosebumps all over.

'What is it?' the captain asked me in an undertone as we walked back through the hall, under the interested stares of the guests.

'Well either we've pulled - and I don't fancy your's much - or we've got trouble,' I whispered back. 'That hooded guy had his attention fixed on you, boyo. Maybe we've been made?'

'They haven't killed us yet. If they have rumbled us, they probably want to interrogate us first. That gives us time,' he replied calmly. 'We have eyes on the murdering bastard we came for - let's play this out. I don't plan on hitting the panic button just yet.' But I noticed him sneak a look back over his shoulder as we left the room, and I did the same.

The hooded guy was still watching us - or more likely Harlock - intently. And for all his carefully studied aplomb, the captain had a tiny frown forming on his forehead as we stepped through those massive doors again, and was nibbling slightly on his bottom lip.

'What's got _your_ thong in a twist?' I asked as we walked, taking advantage of the total lack of interest from our guards, who were discussing amongst themselves the oddity of such a reservation of such ordinary specimens as us.

'I don't know,' he replied, sounding really puzzled. 'For a moment there I had a feeling I know that guy… the way he stands, the way he was looking at me...'

'Well if he gets in our way, add him to the shopping list,' I said quietly. He shot me a look but it wasn't one I could readily decode.

'Quit talking!' One of our guards gave me a shove in the back and I gave him the stink eye by return of post. From the corner of my eye I saw Harlock give me his keep-it-down headshake, and I piped down. We'd caught a break finally - maybe. I wasn't going to be the one to blow it.

We caught a second break when they shoved us into a small room all on our own and slammed and locked the door behind us. After waiting a few minutes to be sure our guards had left the area, We got to work checking the place for surveillance devices.

Once we were sure we were in the clear, it was time to _really_ get to work...

.


	4. Chapter 4

_When the mantis hunts the locust, he forgets the shrike that's hunting him._ _  
 _Chinese Proverb__

* * *

Our guards shoved us roughly into a small room on the first floor.

'Is this part of the plan, or is this the bit where you stare into the middle distance, tug at your eyepatch and mutter "bugger" under your breath and hope no-one hears you?' I asked once the door had shut behind us

The captain ignored me and started to examine our new surroundings. One large bed ( _so_ not sharing...). The walls were solid stone, close fitting, and probably over a foot thick. The door was over an inch thick made of a solid hardwood. The lock was old-fashioned, thankfully - no fancy electronics, but it had a magnetic pad on it that would set off an alarm when we opened the door, unless we took precautions. There was a small leaded window - barred, so no escape there - that opened onto a wide sweep of lawn, lit by several spotlights. And no damn cover as far as the treeline several hundred yards away.

One light fitting in the ceiling, inset into the stone. Light switch not in sight so presumably outside. No visible cameras. A small cubicle at the back held a toilet and a basin. A couple of towels and two piles of clothing on the bed, the latter of which, when investigated, turned out to be tunic and pants. No boots or shoes. Someone had found the easy way to keep prisoners under control - pulling an escape barefoot is possible, but you'll soon be slowed down, even on the best terrain unless you can obtain footwear that fits.

The captain knelt down to check under the bed, but it was a solid wooden pallet, mortise and tenon construction with a solid foam mattress; no nails, no springs, no ropes, no use.

By the time he stood up and brushed dust out of his hair, I was tapping the walls with a toilet roll holder. Mortar dust trickled onto the floor from where I had pulled the wooden baton from the wall.

'What the hell are you doing?'

'Checking for secret passages,' I replied, feeling like I was explaining the obvious to a small child.

'You watch too many cheap warpvids,' he told me. 'Make yourself useful - help me get some of this stuff off us so we can get dressed and get to work - I'm all slippy.' He realised too late how that sounded 'Just stop right there, Ali. I really don't need to hear it.'

I grinned at him. 'Why captain - after all we've been through together…' I batted my eyelashes and he sighed.

'I'm never going to be allowed to forget this, am I?' he muttered. I picked up a towel and began helping him rub off some of the stuff they'd slicked over us. 'I'm not sure whether this is for presentation, basting us for roasting, or just to make sure we couldn't hold weapons if we did make a break for it…' he said, sniffing at the towel he was using to rub down his arms. 'Plus I smell like a…'

'Tart's boudoir?'

I was all innocence when he shot me his best glare. He looked decidedly unhappy.

'Something got up yer nose? Not much of a fan of perfume meself either. Nothing scarier than a botoxed, satin wrapped cougar bearing down on you, trailing eau de synthetic whale vomit in her wake. I could tell you stories of stuff that went on at faculty dinners… there was this one time, the VC's mistress showed up on the arm of his _wife…'_

'Just get on with it.' His growl was warning that his patience was wearing thin.

'Touchy, touchy. And me being the soul of helpfulness as well. You know - you don't deserve me. The crap I put up with. Now I have to add verbal abuse and threats of bodily harm to the list. Bad enough I have to put up with unwanted sexual advances… and you know I could sue your arse off for _that…'_

'Ali.'

'What?'

'The guard listening outside the door left two minutes ago.'

I handed him the towel. 'Well you'd better get _me_ towelled off then, hadn't ya? Or I'll never be able to get a grip.'

* * *

We both grabbed the pants first, before we got to work. He turned his back and waited. 'In your own time,' he said.

I placed my hands on his shoulders and ran my fingers along them, until I found the slight change in texture I was looking for. My fingers curled, nails digging slightly into his skin. 'You do know this will hurt,' I said quietly. 'Do you want me to go slow, or just go for it and get it over with?'

'Just do it, Ali,' he ordered me through gritted teeth.

'Don't say I didn't warn you. Brace yourself!' I pulled on the skin of his shoulders as hard as I could, and with a ripping noise the whole of his back peeled off. To his credit, he hardly let out a yelp, although it had to have hurt like hell.

I held the soft, moulded prosthetic fake back in my hands. 'Like pulling off a plaster,' I said with a grin. 'But damn… it's left a couple of strips of skin missing… maybe we shoulda tested the adhesive for longer.' I threw it onto the bed.

'Your turn,' he told me. I dutifully turned my back and he repeated the process, although I swear Luna had used more adhesive on my more muscular deltoids. It took him three tries to pull the damn thing off and most of my skin with it.

Whilst I swore at him, he dropped his pants and got to work on a second area, this time on his right thigh. The narrow strip that had covered and replicated the old surgical scar on his leg came free much more easily. He turned it upside down and pulled out the tiny energy packs hidden in it.

Nothing like surgical pins and plates to confuse basic scanners… He yanked his pants back up and turned his attention back to the task at hand.

The two larger prosthetics lay side by side on one of the pallets, and we hunkered down to get to work on their contents.

* * *

There's something really satisfying about have a ship full of geniuses in their respective fields on board the Arcadia - most of them with too much time on their hands. Yattaran, in addition to his engineering skills, is a hobby model maker. Maji likes tinkering with armour, and Luna… well, she used to work on prosthetics back before someone got the idea of doing body-swaps instead of parts. Between them - with a bit of help from Tochiro - they'd come up with a way to smuggle some much needed weaponry and tools past any search - although I'd had a few cold sweats when we'd been stripped, scanned and then showered. Thankfully Luna's handiwork had passed muster, and I made a mental note to drop off a few choice items from Harlock's liquor store when we got back. I'd tell her it was from him. He'd think of it himself eventually anyway.

'Did you catch the exchange in the hall?' he asked as he stripped tiny parts out of their moulded home and laid them out. Yattaran had even created ceramic tools to assist with the assembly. Amazing what the lazy bugger can do when he's interested enough…

''Which bit? I was too busy trying not to throw up.'.

He set to work assembling the two plastic guns, and I screwed the ceramic knives into their hilts and laid them to one side. Their respective holsters and belts were silk - light, strong and highly compressible.

'We'd heard the name Kikai Hakshaku,' he continued. 'It's Japanese…'

'Yeah, I speak it. Who doesn't? "Count Mecha". Your point?'

'We thought it was singular. But it could equally well have been plural. That hooded figure - who was addressed as Count Lazarus… that gave me an idea...'

'A group would make sense,' I nodded. 'You're thinking some kind of what - modern day Hellfire Club?' I paused. 'That's an ancient, famous club for deranged aristos…'

'I do get the reference, Ali. I did have a top class education.' That came out a little more peeved that I'd expected from him. Guess I was getting to him a bit. I decided to dial it down a bit. I'm generous to a fault, me. 'There has to be more to it than this, though. These guys are making a fortune smuggling ex-Gaia Fleet tech, munitions and ships out to anyone who'll pay them. Why risk that - and Promethium's wrath - just to scratch an itch and decorate a few walls? There's another angle, there has to be…' From the soft foam covering he extracted a couple of electrical devices and a nice long length of wire which he neatly attached to two toggles.

'You overthink it sometimes, you know,' I pointed out. 'Some people just get their kicks out of making other people suffer. Some of these high-ranking machinners, they just get their rocks off on being dicks - it's all that's left to 'em - you've said that yourself…'

'Yes,' he broke into my speech. 'But this… it's too well organised. Did you see how many guests there were down there?' he shook his head. 'There's more. I can feel it.'

I turned my attention to the power supplies for the guns, which took some fitting - we'd only field-tested assembling these once, and they were a tight fit. We'd get a maximum of maybe six shots out of each, but hopefully after that we'd be able to pick up some discarded weaponry as we went.

'The guys did us proud,' Harlock said, checking the sights on one of the pistols. They were small - easily palmed - but should, however briefly, pack a punch. 'I thought I'd go mad with the itching though.'

'You can get a powder for that, ya know?' I deadpanned. 'But you really ought to fess up to Kei…'

He swatted my ear for that one, then handed me the second pistol. I'd already palmed two of the knives and a neat knuckleduster made out of the same ceramic compound. 'Is that going to be heavy enough to do any damage?' He looked at it sceptically.

'It's not about the materials - it stops me from scraping my knuckles on someone's jaw, and it's tough stuff - light but strong.'

He just _looked_ at me. 'Seriously - we're going up against machines, Ali - and you're planning on unleashing your uppercut?'

I plucked one of the miniature power sources from where it rested on a blanket, and slid it deftly into a small hole on the side, attaching a couple of fine wires from the coil he'd had secreted in that leg cache. 'There's a small transmitter inside,' I informed him smugly. 'Slam this puppy into the right place and someone will be nursing a headache…'

'Someone already is,' he muttered. I stared at him, seeing for the first time he looked a little pale and sweaty. I picked up a knife, and got to work on one of the sheets. A minute later I handed him a strip of fabric, with a bit of the soft inner lining of our false backs cut to size.

'Try that. Best I can do under the circumstances.'

He tied it on and gave me a nod of thanks. I couldn't resist: 'You know, next time, maybe you should pack a spare.'

He ignored me. 'Check the window - it should be close to dawn by now.' He grabbed the toolkit, rescued from its foam nest. 'I have a lock to pick.'

'Red sky in the morning,' I called out whilst he fiddled with the lockpicks. 'Pirates warning…'

'This planet has a _red_ sun,' he pointed out, poking at the tumblers. To my mind he was seriously out of practice, but in his defence we had been kept rather busy the past few years.

'Your point?'

He counted to ten. He thinks he's being cute. 'Just run down the list of chemicals we need to find - you did tell me you thought we could get everything you need for incendiaries, smoke and some nice explosives from the average household cleaning products, as I recall. Or was that just bullshit?'

'Please. I've forgotten more about improvised explosives than you'll ever know…' I replied a bit sniffily. Honestly, the nerve of the man...

'Don't bet on it. I aced that course,' he muttered through clenched teeth as one of his probes got stuck. 'Ah, gotcha!'

Of course you did. Bloody theorists. 'Then whaddya have to drag me along for, genius?'

'Comic relief,' he deadpanned.

'I have a knife in my hand,' I informed him with casual precision from somewhere near his left shoulder.

'Then don't run with it,' he shot back, as he slipped a neodymium magnetic strip in between the door and the alarm sensor. I stuck my tongue out but the gesture was lost on the back of his head. He pushed the door away from him carefully, and let out a breath when it opened without the alarm going off. 'And Kei thinks I've lost my touch,' he said brightly, sounding rather pleased with himself. 'Now all we need to do is…'

He straightened, raised his hands and backed into the room, the business end of a pistol shoved under his nose. The arm holding the gun came into view, followed by the rest of its owner: a tall, mantled figure with its face hidden deep within the hood of its long cloak.

'Going somewhere?' asked Count Lazarus.


	5. Chapter 5

The greatest plans of badass space pirates go oft awry… Or something like that. I don't think that mom said it quite like that, but I think she'd understand. You go to such trouble to come up with plans, counterplans, what-to-do-if-it-all-goes-tits-up plans and some inconsiderate asshole still finds a way to rain on your parade.

Or in this case sticks the business end of a pistol up your captain's nostrils just as you're about to launch your amazing, heroic two-man rescue. I mean, we'd meticulously planned this baby for - ohhh - all of two minutes… a record for the captain.

Except… we're pirates… and one thing we don't need to plan for? Yeah. Someone pulling the same sneaky shit to us that we like to do to others.

You don't need to plan for the shit you live on a daily basis. So if Mr. Mysterioso in the cloak thought he had the upper hand? Oh boy did he get a surprise…

The captain dropped, down and back out of the line of fire, rolled and was out of my sightline in a heartbeat. And me? I did what I do sooo well… got off three straight shots with the pistol I had in my hand, sending him staggering into the corridor wall before he could shoot. I closed with the bastard and let him have a meaty, knuckleduster clad fist to the centre mass. He crumpled as the current zapped him and I have to hand it to Maji - the built in taser worked like a charm - albeit briefly. But it's hard even for a dial-head to do much when you kick his weapon out of his hand and plonk over 200lbs of solid geologist on his chest.

'Stop wriggling,' I advised our hooded attacker. 'Or I'll think you're enjoying it.'

The captain was back on his feet and had his pistol in his hand, covering Lazarus. 'Ali- any sign of the guards?'

I checked up and down the corridor. 'Nada, so far. Asshole here seems to be flying solo…' I looked a bit more closely at my cushion. 'We're honoured, by the way - we have a high-ranking skin-job here.' I reached out to tweak back his deep hood. 'Wonder what he's hiding under here?'

Quick history lesson here: machinners come in several types. Top of the pile are nano-forms - made up of tiny sand-sized machines. There are vanishingly few of these - mainly Promethium and her court. They can pass for human, if they want to, and are almost impossible to destroy, so long as even one nano-bot survives. Rumour has it Promethium distributed her consciousness years ago into some massive planet-sized machine, and tends to use copies of her old body (and a few organic clones) as puppets.

Then there's skin-jobs - very expensive bodies, almost indistinguishable from the real thing. Synthetics through and through. Down from there varying grades of mechanical forms, right down to the simple, spindly foot soldiers. They also transfer some poor sods into machine parts for their battleships and stations. Our guy, from the look of the bits of him I could see, was a synth - which meant he was well-connected. Maintenance of that synth-bod ain't cheap.

I flipped the hood of his head, not sure what to expect.

The captain's shocked choking noises wasn't on the list. 'You know this asshole?'

I checked over the face revealed. I'd put him around the captain's age - maybe a little younger, but then, the captain still has his boyish charm when he wants to turn it on, and hell - these things can look like anything or anyone they want, so who knows? Black hair, worn down to his collar. Grey eyes, a long nose, and the lips were thin - I'd go with "cruel" - and he had a way of staring at you as though he'd seen something he wanted to squash under his jackboot. He was even wearing a natty little goatee, in an attempt to look even more like some cheap villain, I guess. Some guys just love to roll with the time-honoured classics.

And now I looked, he did look a little familiar. That snooty sneer gave me a sense of deja-vu all right.

The captain, however, looked like he'd seen a ghost. 'Just grab some sheets and rip 'em up,' I told him. 'I need something to tie this prick up with.' He'd got the wild-eyed look that reminded me of the night his daughter was born - best thing you can do with a guy who gets that deer-in-headlights look is give him something to do.

Unless of course he's wise to it and gives you that do-I-look-like-a-total-idiot look. But he did grab the sheets, and a few minutes later I was able to get up, and our would-be smart-arsed captor was glaring daggers at the pair of us.

Well, mostly at the captain. Me, I just about rated somewhere above a cockroach, judging from the sneer I got when I yanked the strips of fabric tight.

'Captain? You got that garotte?'

' _Captain_ , is it now?'

'Do you practice that verbal sneer?' I asked. 'Coz it needs work… a bit heavy on the dripping-with-contempt…'

'Ali.' The captain had that tone in his voice that advised me to shut up and fast. Not that I usually took much notice, but I was curious, so I shut my flap and shoved our prisoner into our former cell, not being too careful about how many walls I bounced him off. With his hands tied behind his back, he couldn't protect himself, and landed in a heap in the middle of the floor.

'Oops,' I added. I took the garotte off the captain, separated it from the toggles and used it to give our prisoner an extra disincentive to try and break free. Given time a machinner could easily break through the fabric strips - but a nice length of wire around wrists and ankles would take its hands and feet off - and not many'll risk it.

I took up a pose in the doorway so I could watch for trouble. No telling whether or not Lazarus - or whoever he was - had a way of calling for help. I also kept one eye on the action in the cell, as the captain stood over the skin-job, looking down at him with the oddest look on his face.

'This isn't possible,' he said quietly. 'You're dead…'

Well, that explained the moniker…

'Apparently not.'

Damn… that oily baritone _was_ familiar…

'That's a matter of opinion. My brother died in my arms seven years ago and I shot his body into a sun less than a week later - and at no point was that body off my ship. So whoever you are, you're _not_ Isora.'

'Really, Yama? You're still that naive? Or does it suit _Captain Harlock_ to tell himself that machinners are just digital copies of the dead - soulless automata, a facsimile of life? It must make killing them so much easier on that pathetic conscience of yours…'

'Sure sounds like your brother…' I muttered. Yeah. I remembered that sneer now. I'd been standing next to the communication centre on the bridge when the bastard had laid into the rookie recruit who'd turned out to be a spy. At the time I'd shrugged, smirked, and called it poetic justice.

Now? Now that rookie was my captain, and anyone who started dissing him could go through me first. 'If you can't show some damned respect, maybe you should just shut your damn mouth, dial-head.' I strode into the room, grabbed a length of sheet off my captain, and gagged the bastard.

'Ali-'

I stood up and gave him a shove towards the door - not hard enough to floor him. I'm nice like that. 'We ain't got time for this now, cap'n. He ain't going anywhere tied up like this. Mission first, remember? We got a couple of dozen people - real people - need our help. We can come back for this one when we've got the ponce in the fancy frock-coat. Then you can ask some searching questions.' I grinned down nastily at our captive. 'Including why this skin-job is walking around wearing your brother's face and sporting a stupid beard of evil.' I shook my head and tutted. 'That last's an offence that _really_ needs takin' care of.'

Brother or not, those grey eyes promised a nasty, prolonged, painful death if he ever got his hands on me. I leaned over and patted him on the cheek. Damn me if the skin doesn't feel as warm as the real thing. Always freaks me out. I had a run-in once with this girl - hair down to her knees…

 _Yeah. Digressing_. 'Be a good… whatever. We'll be back to play with you later.'

If looks could have killed I'd have been a slimy smear on the floor.

'Ali - to throw your own words back at you - on mission?' The captain stood in the doorway with his best laconic face on, leaning against the doorframe in that way he does - arms folded, slouching, letting his hair fall over his eyes in that fuck-you to the world we all know and love so much. It's also his way of telling you to get a damn move on.

See - after a while, you learn to speak "captain" on the Arcadia. The previous guy used to be harder to read, but his dialect was a bit "older" is all. I sauntered over to him - doesn't do to look too obedient, after all. Might give him ideas. 'Ready when you are.' I pulled the door to behind us and wedged it shut - wouldn't stop anyone getting in, but it would stop Count Undead from getting out - unless he could charge like a tank.

* * *

The nice thing about dial-heads is their arrogance. They think they're so damn superior to normal humans that we're almost beneath contempt. Security in this pile of stone was a joke - practically non-existent.

I love it when the bad guys do most of our job for us.

We did have to scuttle behind some statuary at one point. For the second time in twenty-four hours I was shoved up against a wall by my captain. Thankfully this time he didn't shove his tongue down my throat. But I did have my crotch pushed up against a hard male bum. Alabaster, this time. 'No hard feelings,' I muttered, patting the naked Adonis on the left cheek. I peered over its shoulder, and was grateful they'd positioned it facing outwards. 'Damn, captain - I always thought these things were supposed to be hung like a hamster?' I ran a hand over the surface of the smooth back of the figure. 'Oooh, terrestrial travertine. Don't see this much these days - especially with these reddish deposits. Look at the translucent quality of the stone, where it catches the light, and the banding...'

'Ali - shut the fuck up.' They say you can't hiss a sentence without sibilants, but we all know that it just means a kind of in your face stage whisper designed to get your attention. It works.

I swatted away the face tickling my ear. 'They're downstairs - we're on the landing.'

'And sound carries. So sshh.'

I ssshhed. I knelt down to stick my head out to take a look over the bannister.

In the hall below, several dialheads were dragging in a corpse by the heels, followed by the ponce in the coat - this time also sporting a hat with a jaunty feather in it. The whole look was weird - I mean, from the neck down he looked humaniform, but the face… that plain oval with the single big glowing "eye" in the middle was seriously freaky. I put it down to a fashion choice or something. He was carrying a serious piece of artillery that I didn't fancy being on the receiving end of - a hunting rifle with a large sight bolted on the top. He handed that off to a lackey, and another stepped forward to take his hat and coat.

'Lazy buggers,' I commented. 'Can't even undress themselves, huh?'

'That's the older man from the city,' Harlock whispered somewhere above my head. He was leaning over me, looking over my head. Sure enough, the corpse was the greybeard we'd seen putting up a fight just before we'd let ourselves be caught. There was a blaster burn on his clothing over his heart, the only injury I could see, but his clothes were torn and muddied.

'A fine hunt, excellency!' one of the guests called out - a partial human-form sporting dials sunk into his torso and arms. 'A single shot, and hardly any damage to the skin!'

'It'll make a fine addition to the trophy room,' the fancy-pants count agreed. 'There's something so much more satisfying about the ones that put up a fight!'

His lackey and guest dutifully obliged by laughing with him. I felt my hands close on the wooden railing in front of me, and noticed the hand next to mine was similarly white and clenched. 'Captain?'

'I've seen more than enough, Ali.' He'd palmed Lazarus' pistol at some point, and was checking the charge when I shuffled round on my knees to look at him. He was glaring down at the scene in the hall with that look I knew all too well. 'Let's find the servants' staircase and get you to the kitchen. Time to earn your keep.'

I shuffled back until I could stand up again shielded by my alabaster Adonis. Actually, spotting the animal skin casually sculpted over muscular shoulders, and the large club in the other hand, I revised my mental annotation. This was Heracles - a fairly modern copy- less than a couple of hundred years old. The lack of any weathering gave it away. I patted him on the ass again. 'Sorry old man. My bad…

'Ali…' the warning tone let me know I was drifting off-topic again.

'Yeah. Right. No problem.'

We were halfway down the stairs before I added: 'Hang on - I get _paid_ for this?'

A blaster bolt whizzed past my ear and the dialhead I'd totally failed to spot crumpled up with a muted electronic howl. 'Put it on my tab,' Harlock replied - somewhat snarkily, I thought.

'Thanks,' I muttered. I left it up to him if I meant for the save or for the promise of a favour or three. It wasn't like any of us needed money - nice thing about piracy is we kinda all share in the spoils, and the captain ain't greedy. We just take what we need when we need it.

I wished that extended to weapons. Right now I'd prefer to be the one with the best blaster.

Oh well. Half an hour uninterrupted me-time in the kitchen and I could even up the odds a bit in ole Ali's favour...


	6. Chapter 6

'I wouldn't!'

Harlock's voice rapped out at me as I reached for a loaf left in the middle of the table.

'I'm hungry…' I whined at him. 'My stomach thinks my throat's been cut, and I don't think so well on an empty stomach. Not,' and I waved a bread-filled fist at the chemicals I was assembling on a side table, 'to mention handling explosives…'

'The only humans in this house are prisoners,' he said in his best reasonable voice. The one he uses to explain to Yumi and the twins why whatever havoc they've just caused wasn't a good idea. 'And you'll be even less capable of thinking straight if they've laced the food to keep their captives biddable.' Come to think of it it's the same voice he uses when the unholy duo of Yattaran and Maji have kicked the internal self-repair into overdrive after a crazy all-nighter...

I put down the bread and tried manfully to ignore the rumblings in my midsection whilst I got to work. Meanwhile the captain dropped the bar on the heavy wooden door, and started to rummage in the cupboards. Whilst I tried to avoid spilling several noxious substances, he emptied containers, gave them a rinse and stacked them up ready to fill. Gotta hand it to him - along the way he did decant a few edibles that had been sealed.

'Crackers?' I cast a gloomy but longing eye over the little wafers and sighed 'They'll do I suppose - no cheese though?'

'Beggars and choosers,' he quipped.

'Next time, _I'm_ in charge of the picnic basket,' I told him. He just smiled briefly and got on with screwing lids back onto plastic bottles.

Something had gotten into my one-size-fits-all (hah!) pants however, and it was bugging me. 'You know,' I began, in my lightest, most conversational voice, 'you're awfully calm considering…'

He looked over at me, waiting. When I didn't immediately elaborate, he shook his head slightly. 'The skin-job upstairs?'

See, he's bright sometimes. A bit slow on the uptake at others, but he doesn't do too badly. And hell, at least he talks to - and with - the crew. The last guy, you could have tied a rocket ship to his tongue and still not dragged a full conversation out of him.

'It's _not_ my brother.' Bottletop screwed tight enough to squeak, and bottle _plonked_ on tabletop.

Bold. Flat. Direct. Accepting of no dissent. Huh. Denial, much?

'Yeah, but -' I never can leave well enough alone, even when the red flag is up.

 _Especially_ when the red flag is up.

Another bottle filled and screwed. _Plonk_. 'How am I so sure? I'm sure, Ali. For one very simple, technical reason.' _Squeak_. _Plunk_. 'Soul rings do _not_ work at a distance.' _Squeeek_. _Thump_.

Oh. Ah. Hadn't thought of that one, had I? He had a point. Lar Metal's download tech stripmines your very self out of your head and stuffs it in a metal body leaving nothing but a rapidly cooling husk - and whilst it exists, you can just carry on regardless. Even transfer to a new body if you need to. But he's right - it requires physical contact, and he'd dragged his brother off the bridge of the dying Oceanos and onto the Arcadia before the government had tried to destroy Earth - and by extension, anything in its way. Like two ginormous battleships impaled on each other… Ergo: no soul ring.

But he wasn't _that_ calm, was he, judging by the thumps. I gently removed one of my improvised devices from his fingers and placed it gently on the table. Without a plonk. Or a thump. Or a thud. 'You're making me nervous. Stop it,' I told him. 'And you ain't that sanguine, are you? What's got your bollocks in a twist? Apart, that is, from these pants…' I had to give mine a good hard tug to straighten up the seam that was trying to cut me in two starting with my balls. Between that, over thirty hours without sleep, my empty tum and cold bare feet, my mood wasn't getting any better.

'Skins pre-date Lar Metal's programme by a few hundred years, he replied, smirking as I squirmed. 'They were used as sex toys, but also as spies - remember the stories from the Kamiyo Plan period - the first diaspora? They used to create personality templates for the AIs…'

'Hell yeah!' I snapped my fingers. 'I saw those movies… "Sexaroid" - that vid with the goofy spy and his sex-bot sex-pot sidekick… always losing her clothes…' I sniggered. '"Sexaroid in the Dinosaur Zone" was my favourite - musta seen that about ten times as a kid… amazed I didn't get hairy palms from that…'

'Ali.'

I knew that tone. 'Too much information?'

'Way too much.'

I gave him a hard stare as I wiped down the last bottle. 'So what - you think maybe the military copied that bastard somehow?'

A shrug. Awww. Bless 'im. Still trying to be all nonchalant. Me, I'd have been climbing the damn walls if someone had stuffed a copy of Phil under my nose…

'Or someone's just trying to yank my chain - although that would suggest we'd been made by someone other than Lazarus, and if that were the case, we wouldn't be enjoying our little baking session down here…'

He had a big point. Machinner security - outside the military - is notoriously slack. 'But still… even if it's just an AI with your brother's memories, it's still…'

'A royal pain in the ass, but nothing I'm going to cry over. We'll do what we came to do and pick up the trash on the way out.' A pause. 'Damn - I should have at least taken its damn boots on the way out - we'd be the same size if they modelled the body on him….'

I beamed at him. 'See - this is why I like you, cap'n. You always think of the _important_ things. Eventually.'

He grabbed two bags from inside a low cupboard. 'Just pack your handiwork carefully,' he told me. 'We passed some storerooms where they'd stuffed the captives' clothing on the way - I'll see if I can locate some footwear and I'll meet you back at the stairs.'

'Size twelve!' I called out after him.

'Dream on,' he called back over his shoulder. 'Luna tells me you're a ten and a half, tops…'

'Oh,' I muttered after his retreating, smug back. 'You _will_ pay for that when we get back… 'Just you wait until I tell your lovely, stuffed-full-of baby-number-four wife what _you_ were doing in a dark alley with your chief gunner…'

I suppose I can't blame him too much for chucking my own, still-mucky-from-the-alleyway boots at my head.

* * *

My job in all of this was to create a diversion whilst the captain got to work in another part of the building. I can't say I liked the idea of splitting up - I prefer to know someone's watching my back on these capers - but our chances of slipping more than two people into this setup had been vanishingly small. So I was left to sneak around planting some nasty homemade devices whilst the captain did his thing - which would probably involve snooping through the computers (did dial-heads have warp-porn? If so he'd need brain bleach…) and trying to rescue a bunch of civilians, most of whom would probably be as shit scared of him if they knew who he was, as they'd be of their captors.

Never did understand the bad press we get - I mean - we're the _good_ guys, right? And the captain takes a good wanted poster pic… plastered over more teenage bedroom walls than most pop stars and warp-vid actors, he is.

'Bloody ungrateful, that's what everyone is,' I muttered to myself as I placed a nasty little improvised charge in a doorway. There's a nice two-part explosive you can make with…

Anyway. Don't try that at home. I'm an expert. Which means if I blow my damn cock off when a bottle full of cutlery and a mix of household chemicals goes off a bit premature, it's because I'm a professional and know what I'm doing...

Tie off. Make unsafe. Check the wire's nice and tight. Check the dinky little detonators we'd packed in the strip of padding over Harlock's repeatedly abused thighbone. Back away carefully. Lather, rinse, repeat.

God, I'm good…

The next door I tried led into the main hallway. I peeked around the crack between door and architraving careful not to open it too wide. A glimpse was enough. Two dial-heads on the front door. Not a good time to alert them, although the dumb clucks were leaning on the walls looking for all the world as though they were fast asleep.

Some habits died hard, I thought. I closed the door and backed away. Since it wouldn't do to retrace my steps exactly, for obvious reasons, I headed for the east wing, and the captain.

* * *

'Miss me?' I said, staring down the barrel of the pistol he'd nicked off the copy of his brother. He lowered the gun and just glared at me.

'Didn't we have the conversation about sneaking up on me?' he growled.

'Ooh. someone's got his boxers in a bunch,' I chirped at him. 'And yes daddy, you did. Round about the same time we had the one about not running at dial-heads whilst armed only with a knife, and one about unwanted sexual advances towards female crewmembers, which was _totally_ misaimed, coz _Luna_ jumped _me_ , not the other way-'

'Ali.'

'Oooh. Tone.'

'Oooh - I'm not sure anyone will ask too many questions if I accidentally leave you behind.'

God. He can be such a sarky bugger sometimes… Makes me long for the old captain sometimes…. 'Find what you were looking for?'

'I found my way through the firewall, but someone had cleaned out the files ahead of us. I'm not liking this.'

Huh. Me neither. I was getting a nasty little itch between the shoulder blades and this time it wasn't fleas. 'Well you'll have your diversion - I've got the route covered. So when do we make a move.'

He pointed to a printout he'd pinned to the table with a couple of gorgeous flourite vases - real antiques, must have come from someone's stasis stash, coz you just don't see that blue-and-offwhite-banded stuff anymore. The stuff came from one small hilly valley in the north of a small northern island, nowhere else in the world, and the mines ran out back in the twenty second century, and they'd stopped making this kind of ornament back in the early twentieth. Plus the stuff's not only fragile, it loses its colour when heated. For it to survive over a thousand years… I ran a hand over one of them, my fingers feeling the fine cracks in the surface. I wanted to weep at the idea of leaving them in the hands of a bunch of mechanical philistines who'd never appreciate either the workmanship or the geology that made them so unique.

'Ali.'

I pulled myself away from the pretty rocks. Yeah. Focus.

'We can't save everything.'

'Yeah, I know - people first. But with Earth turned into the nine circles of hell and covered by the waters of the Phlegethon…' I sighed theatrically.

'Ali - what did we say about Bronze Age Classical allusion in the workplace?' he asked with that look that pretty much tells me I've over-egged it a bit.

'That I shouldn't mix it with fourteenth-century Italian literary allusion?' I deadpanned. 'Hey - don't blame me because you had a substandard education!'

'When _you_ can recite Dante in the original Italian, we'll talk. Try to focus,' he growled at me, clearly having lost the argument and not wanting to admit it. 'This is a plan of the building and grounds - the prisoners will be here-' he pointed. 'A holding area ready for transport.'

'Off world?'

'Some - the ones sold for "decoration". One thing I did find was the sales invoices. Someone in this organisation was an accountant in their past life.'

I shuddered. 'Poor bastard. What a fate. You think you can start again and immortality means you just end up exactly where you were before...' I thought for a minute. 'So the others - staying here - like our greybeard back there?'

'The most dangerous game of all,' he said softly. 'The other invoices were for hunting permits, energy capsules and accommodation and transport. For the right price - and it is pretty hefty - you can select your prey and set them loose in the ground to hunt and bring down.'

I did think for a minute I was going to throw up in my mouth. Not a good idea. Dry crackers taste vile on the way back up. 'So it's official.'

'I have copies. Enough to start bringing down some of those involved.' But he didn't look as happy as I thought he would.

'So what gives?'

'This place - the dial-head in the coat running it is just an employee. This whole setup is being run from off-world, and guess which files were conveniently missing?'

'Bummer.' I watched him as he went over our plan of attack, outlining how we'd move the prisoners out, and when I should let rip with our diversion. He'd thought of something. I just knew it. And whatever it was he really, really didn't like it.

Conveniently missing, huh? I could read between the lines of what he wasn't saying. 'Just out of interest, Cunt Lazarus' name wouldn't be on any of those bills for services rendered, would it?'

'Shouldn't there be an "o" in that?' he retorted a little listlessly.

I made a pretence of thinking about that. 'Nope… don't think so.' I jabbed a finger at him. 'And since you're avoiding the damn question, I'll take it that _he's_ not being billed, is he? And if someone that supposedly connected ain't on the guest list…' I let the thought trail off, and waited.

He ignored me, just picked up his pistol and let the map roll up again.

Bingo.

'You think that the ersatz Isora's actually on staff, don't you?' Or - worst case - actually in charge… I ran it through my head. Synth bodies are expensive to maintain - and a black-market op like this must be rolling in it, from the stories we'd tracked down. It did make a sick kind of sense.

That shoulder-itch was back, now with big claws picking at it. The captain's mouth was a grim line, and I didn't need to be a mind-reader to see he'd already gotten ahead of me.

Who better to get a line on some military grade hardware and transports the like of which had been moving through the same group, than a former Gaia Fleet Admiral? Than _the_ Gaia Fleet Admiral… 'Crap.' I said out loud. Because it was falling into place. 'You know - we could go back up there and get him…'

'No.'

'But…'

'No, Ali - if he's half the strategist my brother was, then he's already left that body. And we've been on a rapidly running down clock ever since he made us.' He took a deep breath and let it out slowly.

'Then why ain't they breaking down the door and raising seven hells tracking us down?'

'Who says they aren't?' he asked bluntly. 'Isora was brilliant - if you can admire a treacherous, back-stabbing, manipulative, machiavellian, selfish, murdering, cold-blooded bastard who specialised in getting his opponents to lose all hope when they realise they've been played, and sacrificed everything and anyone on the altar of his climb to the top and never let even his closest subordinates know what cards he held if he could avoid it…'

 _Oh yeah_ … I thought, watching the emotions playing over his usually pleasant features. _Of course you're over it. Totally. No hard feelings there at all…_

'Then,' I started reasonably. 'We get the hell out. Now. Call Emmy, and blow this crappy pile from orbit.' I did eye up those flourite vases sadly though…

'If there's even a chance of saving those people, I have to try.' He shook his head in that way that usually means his mind's made up and there ain't no shifting him when he's in that state.

'If there's a chance of saving us, I'm even more in favour of trying,' I retorted. 'I like my ass just fine I'm in no mood to put it on the line for strangers who won't even thank us - for a bunch of people we don't even _know…'_

'Ali.'

I _hate_ it when he puts _that_ particular emphasis on my name. 'That's my name, and you're wearing it out, captain.'

'You want to leave, you're free to go any time you want to. The door's not locked, and I'm not ordering you to stay.' He stared at me, all amiable on the damned surface. Like butter wouldn't melt in his butt-crack.

'You _bastard_ ,' I told him eventually. And yes, I followed him out of the damn room and into certain bloody death. What the fuck _else_ was I supposed to do?


	7. Chapter 7

The charges I'd set were not exactly going to bring the house down around us - especially since the damned thing was built of two foot thick local granite - a really nice close-grained dark…

Yeah. Focus… Right. Anyway, the best I'd been able to come up with was a nice mixture that would be incendiary, noisy, and smokey. Perfect for distraction, not so great for demolition. That had been the captain's brief when we talked this over, based on what I could reasonably expect to find, and to a point, I'd agreed with him, nodding and smiling. But I'm also a tricksy bastard, and so's he, so I didn't think he'd mind too much that I'd taken a few liberties with those basic mission parameters when I'd spotted a couple of places where even a nasty home-made mix could cause a few problems. Especially since we'd loaded our improvised explosive devices with any shrapnel to hand, and he'd handed over the cutlery with a cheeky grin.

Remember that. It'll be important later.

'How many did you set?' he asked, with a sidelong glance at the satchel I carried, which bulged in interesting places. I just grunted at him and shrugged.

'I kept a few back,' I told him as we rounded a corner after checking for wandering strays. I flexed my fingers around the knuckle duster I'd slipped on. Thanks to Yattaran's incredible skills (and I'll never bloody let him hear me say that, or the fat lazy tosser will never shut up about it…) the miniaturised electronics in it would also double as a remote detonator - five frequencies, each one reachable by curling over a finger to touch an almost imperceptible button once the safety was off. We really do get the best toys… 'When do you want the fireworks to start?' He held up a hand and I almost slammed into his back, he stopped so fast. We were approaching another crossroads.

I waited a moment, then opened my trap to ask him what the hell was going on. then I heard what he had: voices with a slight metallic twang.

'Two guards, to the left,' he whispered. I'd take his word for it. I took a better grip on my pistol.

'Want me to take them out?'

He shook his head and we slithered back down the corridor a ways. 'That's the holding area. Beyond is the barracks, unless that blueprint was a pack of lies. We start anything here, we could be up to our ears in drones.'

I waggled the fingers adorned with my new man-jewellery under his nose. 'Time for a few fireworks?' I asked. He just grinned at me.

Hell, I didn't need telling twice. I followed him into a small side-room and waiting behind the door as he kept his good eye on the crack. Mentally I went over the route I'd taken, and worked out roughly where the best place to start would be. I do have pretty good spatial awareness, even if I do say so myself. You need a pretty good sense of direction underground and in space - and I've worked both in my time.

Hey - I wasn't always an heroic cosmic corsair. Once upon a time I'd been a highly paid, highly sought-after consultant on various geological surveys and mining operations. Until I pissed off the wrong people.

So… figuring that we'd need something up a floor, and close enough to draw the guards away, I triggered the third set of charges I'd set.

This was one of the incendiaries - within seconds, the alarms were going off, and we were both gritting our teeth and longing to stick our fingers in our ears because we'd picked a room right next to one of the damn sirens, and we couldn't close the damn door fully on it because we needed to keep an eye on the headless chickens.

Even through the piercing shrieking in our ears though, we could hear heavy booted steps running hither and thither outside, and tinny electronically modulated voices squeaking and squawking orders at each other.

'Another one for luck?' I mimed at the captain. When he gave me a puzzled shrug wondering what I'd said, I thought: to hell with it. We'd need all the distraction we could get.

So I blew one of my secret little additions on the other side of the building, inside the kitchen we'd worked in. The one that would take out the power to that section and the main utility hub. The one that would feed back into the area marked "lubricant storage" that I'd noticed in passing..

Flammable, that stuff.

The resulting blast shook the entire building and the next thing I knew, we were on the floor, coughing, as dust and grit floated down on top of us. The alarms had stopped though.

And it was pitch dark.

'Ali…'

Even in the darkness I could picture the look on his face. Oops.

'Did you set a charge on the power hub?' His mouth was right up against my right ear and he was yelling.

I nodded a bit sheepishly, and then remembered it was still dark. Funny that; I was still seeing stars. 'Might have done,' I said nonchalantly. Though I had to shout - my ears were still ringing.

Or maybe the alarm was still going?

The red emergency lighting came on, thankfully, and I took a look around. In the dim red light I could make out the captain, looking a little the worse for wear, face and hair covered in dust, a deep cut on his head bleeding rather nastily. He looked a little green around the gills and far too late I remembered that he wasn't too fond of having rocks land on his head. Comes of having being hurt in an accident years before he was our captain, though we've all had a go at dropping things on his head over the years - Yattaran and Maji started the trend within a week of him becoming captain; I almost managed it only a couple of years back on an asteroid.

Of course it could have just been the lighting…

'Up you get!' I went for chirpy denial. I figured he couldn't be mad at me when I'm being so helpful, now could he? I helped him to his feet and brushed off some of the dust and stone chippings before he slapped my hand away. Some people can just be so _rude…_

'Leave it.' His tone should have left a breath trail in the air, it was so frosty. 'Let's move - I want those people out of this place. Assuming of course anyone survived that attempt to bring down the building…'

And he didn't even say thank you.

* * *

'Rock paper scissors to see who goes first?' I was perfectly prepared to take point - not out of any intrinsic bravery. Quite the opposite: if anything happened to him, Kei would tear my junk off with her bare hands and nail it to the ship's wheel.

That's if I was lucky. She's previously threatened to do the nailing _before_ ripping my pride and joy off. And yes, I'm more scared of her than I am of him, why would anyone ask? Especially when she's pregnant. Watching that terrifying form waddle up to you, that icy glint in her blue eyes… Yeesh. I shuddered at the thought.

He ignored my suggestion and slipped past me, leaving me to flail around in his wake as usual. All you can do is just hoist up your underwear and follow him. 'Cept we weren't wearing any, so what can you do? Not much, except cover him and hope you don't get shot by whatever's shooting at _him_.

It's hard to bring down machinners without our Tochiro-designed weaponry. They're hard to crack, and hard to disrupt. The chassis are a hardened tectite alloy created with an ancient Nibelung process thanks to the help they got from Loki and his body-hopping renegades. Their "brains" are protected physically and are energy shielded. Short of a lucky hit to a power source, they just keep on coming.

But you _can_ disable the buggers. Blow their arms and legs off and they ain't going anywhere and sure ain't going to be shooting at you. I mean - what they gonna do - wriggle along the floor and bite yer ankles? So that was our tactic - go in, shoot low, and hit the legs, which were always a weak point. Then when they go down, they're too busy to shoot straight.

Great plan - except for the bit where we're just human, unarmoured - without even our flightsuits and jackets, which can disperse most weapons energy blasts. And in an enclosed corridor, with blasts firing wildly everywhere, even wild shots stand a chance of hitting home.

I yanked hard on the captain's collar and hauled him out of the way of one shot that almost took his damn fool head off. Which would have been great, except it put me in the way of a stray ricochet off the floor that would have taken out the bit of my anatomy I was trying so damn hard to save from our enceinte XO's dreadful wrath, if not for the captain throwing himself around like a power forward and slamming us both into a brick wall. After that we were trading shots at ankle height with our foes, at least until I could get my hand into the bag I was still carrying and lobbed a former water bottle at them.

Cutlery: at high speed, it's a great leveller. But not exactly safe for the bystanders.

'Maybe that wasn't such a great idea,' I muttered, as we were pelted with bits of hot metal. I wasn't sure if what singed my ear and my left sideburn was a fork or a finger. 'Guess I didn't judge the time on target that well,' I added sheepishly.

'No shit, was the response, as he brushed something's foot away from his leg - realising his mistake when he burned his fingers. 'I'm blind in one eye and have sod all depth perception - what's your excuse for getting the distance wrong?' he snapped.

'Got the job done, didn't I?' I retorted. No gratitude. I really don't know why I bother some days. 'And where did you learn to hit like a freighter?'

'School rugby team. Full back. When you're slightly built and far too pretty, you learn to tackle on the rugby pitch. And make yourself useful by -' he punted a still smoking piece of a double-dialled head down the corridor some considerable distance - 'kick like it's going out of fashion.'

His improvised ball trickled to a halt missing the dial-head I assumed he'd aimed it at by two clear feet. I shot the writhing thing a couple of times in the head and it at least shut up and stopped moving - either because I got something vital, or it realised discretion was the better part of survival.

We seemed to have succeeded in keeping the rest of the guards occupied for now, because no reinforcements were forthcoming. So we limped towards the door of the holding area, keeping a weather eye out for trouble - and making sure nothing would be shooting at us, by means of blowing their damn hands off. The captain signalled to me to hold back, but why should he have all the glory? I nipped past him. 'This one's on me. Sir.'

'Sir? Since when do _you_ call me _sir_?' But he stayed put and covered me whilst I fumbled with the lock. And "fumbled" is the right word. I can hot-wire a keypad, but I was all thumbs on this one - partly because I'd taken shrapnel to my right arm, and it wasn't working as well as I'd like. I bowed out gracefully after the third heartfelt sigh from over my shoulder, and let the former spy get to work, and he had it open in seconds.

However I still insisted on going first. Which whilst it wasn't my worst mistake over the past forty-eight hours, proved to be the messiest, because I did the gun-first, check for a trap routine, and totally forgot to look at anything below knee height. Consequently I went flying as my feet skidded out from under me, landed on my arse in a sticky, wet, slightly warm puddle and tipped forward onto my face to find myself looking straight into the glassy, opaque eyes of a dead girl barely older than Emmy.

Her throat had been cut.

I looked around, feeling those bloody crackers heading up my gorge, and the beginnings of one of those cold, sweaty headaches rolling over me as I realised I was sitting in a large pool of congealing blood, in a room full of corpses.


	8. Chapter 8

I swallowed hard and wished I hadn't. The taste of acid in my mouth and the burning sensation in my throat almost set me off again.

Anyone who says they're okay with death hasn't seen it up close and personal. I mean, sure, we've taken out fleet patrols, marines, and shiploads of pirates who actually pirate for a living in our time. But there's a hell of a difference between killing and murdering, if you get my drift. Anyone shooting at me deserves whatever they get, and that's how most of us handle it.

What I don't do - what _nobody_ on the Arcadia does - is kill without a reason.

Yes, there was a bad time in the past, under the last captain, where maybe we could find a good reason listed under "in our damned faces" but it only ever applied to military ships, and in our defence, The Captain had sold us all on this "we're going to reboot time itself" plan he had, and it felt like a cheap video game - you know - just hit a button to restart the level, no harm, no foul.

In hindsight I'm really not too proud of it. And it's not something the new captain encourages, although a few things will make him go all zero-tolerance.

This, for example. He came skidding in behind me, guns akimbo, in response to my girly shrieks and almost tripped over me.

'Fucking hell.' His voice held that soft, very quiet note it gets just before all hell breaks loose.

I heartily seconded the sentiment. There must have been two dozen bodies in the room, piled up like so much discarded meat. The blood I was kneeling in was still slightly warm, so this had happened recently, but I guessed before we'd started our escape. They'd been killed here, because there was no trace of blood outside the room - that, we'd have seen on the way in, since we'd had our noses to the ground finishing off the clockwork creeps.

'They're still warm,' I told him. I took the outstretched hand that helped me to my feet, and only just avoided bringing us both down again. 'Whoever did this made their move not long after the damn auction - I recognise some of these kids, Harlock - why the hell would someone do this? It's like a fox ran rampant in a bloody henhouse! Why destroy their own merchandise? I doesn't make any sense.'

'That depends on whether or not the person - and I use the term loosely - responsible thinks they have a bigger agenda and can write off the losses,' he mused. There was a quietly savage undertone in his voice that never boded well.

'It's sick.'

'It's _calculated_ ,' he corrected me softly. 'It makes perfect sense if whoever did this wants to shock, disorientate, and really, _really_ piss me off.'

'Lazarus.' I wasn't going to dignify the bastard with any other name. The captain had enough problems right now. We both did. 'There's nothing we can do for these poor bastards, but we left that prick upstairs - I vote we go back and get him, and pull his arms and legs off.' I looked around at the carnage, my fingers curling so tight around the butt of my pistol the fingernails were digging into the palm of my hand. 'Shit, Harlock - there's not a one of them a day over twenty-five. Even on this shithole of a planet they had some chance of a future better than this.'

'I know,' he said shortly, and checked the charge on his guns. 'Now if I'd planned this, I'd have a group on standby with orders to ignore any mayhem, which suggests our odds against getting out of here just grew exponentially. I'd planned on getting us to the flyers where we landed, and that means we need to reach the main corridor. You did make sure not to bring down the ceiling along our route, I hope?'

I gave him a hurt look. No faith, sometimes.

He smiled at me, a little weakly. 'Fine. How many more charges did you set?'

'Six. I tried to set them where they'd hopefully slow down the pursuit and cause the most disruption, but I only had that partial plan to work with. Apart from that lucky hit on the power lines and their lube store, there weren't many places I could get to that would cause much structural damage. At least from where we were - I might be able to set a few more as we go, but they'd be mostly flash-bangs and shrapnel.'

'How many left to set?' He'd moved to the doorway to check for activity. Thankfully we were still all alone.

'I've got seven left.' I'd clutched the satchel tight when I'd fallen, and thankfully it hadn't landed on the hard floor, so its contents were undamaged.

He eyed the bulging bag sceptically. 'Looks a bit heavy for only seven,' he opined. I didn't answer and he let it go, albeit not without narrowing his eyes at me. Somewhere along the way he'd lost the makeshift patch. 'I'm expecting to run into a ton of trouble at some point on our way out. Stay sharp.'

'As opposed to _what_?' I muttered sarcastically, gesturing to the corpses littering the floor around us. My borrowed togs were sodden and squelched when I moved, and he didn't look much better.

'Playtime's over, Ali,' he told me in that quiet, scary voice. 'I mean it. If Lazarus has my brother's memories, we're in trouble.'

'Last captain handled him,' I pointed out. 'He's not invincible.'

' _Harlock_ shot him in the _back_ ,' he replied sharply. 'And the _only_ reason he didn't wipe us out at the Pluto defense line was because Nami sent me his plans. Don't toy with him, don't talk back to him, don't get cute. Shoot first and take him down.' He'd readied both pistols, one in each hand. I would have pointed out that two-gun mojo when you only have one eye was a bit stupid, but let it lie. They'd still have to duck even if he couldn't hit shit.

'You're that certain this ain't your brother? Just a copy?'

'Consciousness isn't recordable, Ali. Soul ring tech is different - though I still have my doubts. Lazarus might think like my brother, even think he _is_ my brother, but that doesn't make it so. You can copy a singer performing the most beautiful song you ever heard, listen to it forever and a day and enjoy it, and it'll be what it is - but what it _won't_ be - what it can _never_ be - is that first, unique, once in a lifetime performance.'

Well… _there_ was a philosophical can of worms for a long night over a nice bottle of hundred and twenty year old scotch. But at least it meant I might not get my ears chewed off if I shot the bastard in the face. I checked over the charge on my own pistol. Still hovering around the half-way mark. 'Fine. Less talk, more action. And if we don't make it, save your last charge for me - I don't want to go back to Tabito without you, and it'll save me a painful dismembering at Kei's hands…'

At least I could still make him laugh. Except I bloody well meant it…. 'Daft bastard.' he told me, the corners of his mouth twitching. 'I'll take point.'

'Erm…' I began to protest. Then stopped. _Honestly, why bother? Either they pick us off from behind - in which case we were fucked. Or we'd run headlong into an ambush - in which case we were fucked. Either way…_

'Quit mumbling,' he snapped at me as we left the room. I hadn't realised I was whimpering out loud. 'The attack will probably come from an angle we least expect.'

'Oh… you're filling me _so_ full of confidence,' I muttered at his back.

'Well at least it'll replace the shit I usually have to contend with,' came the cheeky reply.

I deserve a medal for not just shooting him between the shoulder blades somedays. I really, really do…

* * *

Two against… aw hell, I lost count. We'd faced worse odds, but on those occasions there were usually more of us around to act as targets. Safety in numbers isn't something to sneeze at. If the guy next to you is getting shot, someone missed _you_.

Okay, maybe that's unfair, coz it makes it sound as though I'd leave a mate to take fire, and I wouldn't. Not even sarcastic, snarky, cheeky, fly-by-the-seat-of-yer-pants charge-into-the-fray-spraying-and-praying captains deserve _that_.

And gawd… he's a one-man wrecking ball when he does that… I'd heard the stories from the guys he'd led on the charge boarding the _Oceanos_ the day we saved Earth (and the Universe. You know - by dint of deciding to _not_ blow it up…) and his tendency to grab a weapon and run headlong into trouble hasn't abated much over the past few years. And as I can testify, he hits like a freight train, for all he doesn't look that solid. Tougher than he looks, our captain.

I placed blasts into what I hoped were key areas of the three he'd just downed like skittles, grabbed their weapons and caught up with him further down the corridor. He'd stopped to get his breath, in a lull between firefights, leaning against the wall at a corner.

Ahead of us was - unless I'd gotten totally turned around - the hallway, and the front door. I handed him one of the guns, and he dropped the depleted firearm he held, and cradled the new one. 'Thanks.'

'Figured you were getting low when that last one didn't go down until you shoulder-charged him.'

He rubbed his shoulder and flashed me a rueful grin. 'That might have been a mistake…'

'Looked spectacular,' I said, trying my best to be all supportive. 'Especially the bit where it had its hand around your throat and you were gurgling whilst you shot it repeatedly in the chest…'

Oooh… the look I got for _that_. I grinned at him - one of my best shit-eating specials. 'See anything?'

'Looks empty.'

I grunted. 'So: "not" then.' That hallway was massive - and flanked by a double staircase, which led up to a balcony. I had a word for it: killing ground.

He heaved a world-weary sigh, and not totally theatrically. He looked and sounded tired. His eyes were slightly bloodshot - even the good one, and he was sporting a good couple of days growth of scruffy facial fuzz. I had a feeling I didn't look much better. 'I hope you held onto a few surprises.' He looked pointedly at my still-bulging satchel.

'I figured we'd need to clear the decks a bit.' I slung the strap for the carbine I was carrying over my other shoulder and reached in for two devices. 'Question is, where do you want me to aim them?'

'Why don't we go with "wherever the shooting comes from"?' he suggested. He raised a hand towards the door and I shifted forwards until I was in a position to block him.

'That doesn't work for me,' I told him bluntly. 'That's your plan? Run into the room and paint a bullseye on your back so I can throw homemade bombs in the direction of the fire? Running headfirst into a hornet's nest isn't gonna do anything but get us both killed…'

'Do you have a better plan?'

I had to shake my head. 'No.'

'Then don't force me to make it an order.'

'Why is it,' I asked mildly, in my nicest voice, 'that the only time you ever pull rank is when you want someone to let you do something stupidly suicidal?'

'Because he's a romantic fool who thinks he's a hero,' said a horribly familiar voice from behind us.

'Rubber soled boots or just standing on a hover board underneath that cloak?' I snarked as I turned around, to see a large blaster pointed at my head. Several, actually. There were six dialheads pointing weapons at us, including Boss from the city. Standing behind them was a cloaked figure, which pushed its hood back from its face as its lackeys disarmed us and told us to put our hands on our heads. My satchel was pulled off my shoulder without so much as a by your leave and my hands emptied of my IEDs. 'Hey - careful with that!' I snapped at the spindle-limbed twat who juggled the bag hamfistedly as if it was about to chuck it on the floor. 'You should handle handmade explosives with a bit more care!'

A gauge-filled face peered into the bag, and set it down on the floor very, very gingerly.

'Lazarus,' Harlock said softly. 'New body already?'

I stared, but couldn't see anything that suggested that scenario. Same sneer framed by the same stupid goatee. Same stick-up-ass posture… Until I spotted that the hair was shorter. Huh.

'Yama. I see you didn't lose the reminder I gave you on the _Oceanos_.'

The captain had lost the latex make-up covering his scars somewhere along the way. The long, slightly zig-zaggy one on his face was visible, as were most of the big freckles under his right eye that are actually blaster speckling.

'Reminder? My brother was trying to blow my damned head off. I don't think "lasting memento to remember him by" was his intent,' Harlock retorted.

Lazarus actually looked pissed by the reply. 'Still in denial, little brother?'

'Denial of what? You're a copy. A cheap knock off. And…' he did the dramatic pause thing here - 'I don't talk to puppets. You're not only a recording, you're a coward. Why don't you face me in person instead of pulling the strings on a succession of marionettes?' He topped this performance off with his head to toe dismissive thing that is guaranteed to piss off the recipient, and I wondered what had happened to the "don't toy with your food" advice he'd given _me_ not that long since.

'Puppets?' I was thinking I'd lost the plot a bit here. 'How can you tell?'

'Telemetry's off,' Harlock explained, not taking his eyes (well, eye…) off Lazarus. 'The lip sync's slightly delayed - it's a bit of a give-away. Emeraldas once told me about it - her mother likes to use the same trick, only she uses her clones.'

Boss stepped forward and slammed the butt of his gun into Harlock's stomach. When he doubled up with an "oof", he followed it up by forcing him to his knees. Another kicked my legs out from under me and forced me to the floor as well, so that the pair of us were forced to stare up at the smug shit-eating smirk under that beard.

'Better,' Lazarus drawled. 'I have so many fond memories of seeing you on your knees, snivelling and begging me for something.' He stepped forward until he could stare right down into the captain's face. 'Forgive me. Love me. _Explain_ to me. _Listen_ to me. It was _always_ about you, wasn't it? The spoilt little mummy's boy, everything handed to you on a plate and always wanting more.'

'Memory without context is just words, Lazarus.' Harlock's voice was calm, but I could see out of the corner of my eye the tell-tale little wrinkle at the corner of his mouth. The jab had hit home.

'Seriously?' I looked from one to the other and shook my head. 'His problem is just that you were mommy's favourite and he wasn't?'

Boss slapped me in the mouth, knocking me onto my back. One of his goons hauled me back into a kneeling position and I spat out the blood in my mouth from my split lip. _Wires. Ripping. Near future._

'Your pitbull has a mouth on it. Maybe you should keep it on a leash,' Lazarus suggested smoothly. 'You know, when I heard you'd taken to screwing a golden haired, blue-eyed member of the crew, I assumed it was the whore in the dominatrix get-up - not the aging tomcat someone dragged out of an alley.'

'The _name's "_ Ali", you fucktard,' I answered, engaging mouth before putting brain in gear. Boss sniggered and hit me again, this time my nose crunched. Lazarus just looked blankly and then ignored me. That's the military for you - no sense of humour.

And now I had blood trickling down the back of my throat as well as over my face. Oh joy.

'You know, 'Lazarus began again, obviously one of those who likes the sound of his own voice, 'when we dragged that spitting hellcat off the bridge that day she was threatening to tear your head off for betraying them. I wonder what changed her mind. Do you think that if I hadn't marked your face and you didn't need that patch she'd have been so quick to change her allegiance? How does it feel to once again be the second choice? If her beloved captain hadn't let go of his tortured existence, do you think she'd have ever looked twice at _you_?'

'If you hadn't guilt-tripped your younger brother into risking life and limb doing your dirty work for you and sent him off on every soul-destroying job you could find to build your career on and kept him out of the way do you think the girl in the box would have settled for _you_?' I snapped back. The way this prick seemed to think he could talk to the captain had by-passed my self-preservation filter a while back. Sure - we diss him sometimes, but there's a line. And that's _us_. We're his - he's ours.

We take care of our own.

And I really, really ought to remember that pushing machinner buttons ain't always a good idea. Some of 'em have some nasty optional extras.

The finger currently sticking through my left shoulder, for example. _Through_. As in right into the bone and out the other side. And trust me, that fucking well hurts like a bitch. I might even have let out a very manly scream of agony. If Boss hadn't been holding me down I might have fainted when the tectite talon was retracted.

The captain offered up a sympathetic and worried look, but mercifully refrained from an "I told you so". Which meant he'd be saving that talk up for later. If we had one.

'I'm through listening,' Harlock said quietly, 'unless you actually have something to say.'

'Say?' Lazarus had recalled some of his former dignity and was now trying to match the captain's patient, quiet restraint. Never thought a mech could shake with anger, though, so he was failing miserably. 'No… you're right. Speeches would be a waste of time at this point.'

'And yet,' I couldn't resist adding. 'Your lips are still flapping…'

No hitting that time. Thankfully. Or stabbing with improvised body parts.

'We'll see how long your sense of humour lasts once you start running,' Boss told me, his mechanical voice dripping with anticipation. 'His Excellency has plans for you two, and you should provide a few hours of sport at least.'

Oh-uh. That I didn't like the sound of. The captain cleared his throat, and I glanced over. He wriggled his fingers where they were laced over his head. I recognised the signal, and shifted my weight slightly, hoping I read it right. I'd once mis-read "drop and roll" as "shoot to the left". Not my finest moment, and LeVary was seriously pissed about losing a muttonchop until his facial hair grew back…

'You came planning on taking out my smuggling operation,' Lazarus continued. 'Too bad for you that you didn't know who you were up against. If you had, you wouldn't have turned up with only this idiot for company.'

That, I took serious exception to. But I held my ground, and quietly stretched as though my arms hurt from being held over my head. Which they did, as it happens.

'What makes you think I only had Ali for back-up?' Harlock asked in his most irritating, mild-mannered voice.

Lazarus' sneer grew even bigger - not that I'd thought that possible. 'Oh - did you mean to rely on that micro-transmitter buried in your leg?' he asked, his tone loaded with fake concern. 'If you're expecting help, it won't be forthcoming. We've jammed any signal you could send.'

I didn't dare look at Harlock at that point.

Lazarus leaned over until his nose was only inches away from Harlock's. 'It seems several of my guests - those who weren't too badly inconvenienced by your attempts to redecorate this lodge - are quite keen to have a chance to hunt down and kill the famous Captain Harlock and one of his crew - even if you are just a pale imitation. So you'll be taken from here, and turned loose on the grounds for our entertainment. And Yama - I expect you to do what you've always done so well - run, and try to save your own skin.' The smirk seemed to be a permanent fixture. 'I'll even make sure if we ever catch your whore, we'll mount her next to you.'

Harlock sighed. 'Lazarus. Two things you really need to know about now. The first is that the transmission wasn't the signal. Turning it off was.'

Consternation in the ranks, and not a little confusion. And whilst Lazarus and lackey were looking at each other for answers, I could just hear a familiar sound - right at the edge of my hearing…

I grinned.

'The second,' he added, and now his voice was silky soft. 'Is that I don't run away from anyone or anything - and I certainly wouldn't ever turn my back on _you_ …'

And then there was an almighty sonic boom, just before something blew the front doors right off.


	9. Chapter 9

I wish I could say I was ready for all hell breaking loose, but I had a wooden door on me at the time. And I was trying to rip the wires out of a particularly obnoxious dial-head which had cushioned my landing, but hell - my gratitude only goes so far. And the bastard had it coming.

But damn, these things are tough to kill. Especially with your bare hands. Boss had been damaged by the blast, so I was busy ripping its innards out with one hand, whilst I flailed around with the other for the bag I knew had been placed on the floor not too far away from where I was wrestling under a nice solid piece of oak with an officer-grade military chassis.

'Ali, quit playing with that damned thing and get out here!' The captain had a shrill note in his voice, so either he was seriously pressed, or my ears were still ringing.

'Then get this bloody door off me and give me a hand!' I yelled back. At least, I tried to. It came out as a series of gurgles because cold metal fingers were trying to throttle the life out of me. I managed to kick, thump and headbutt my way clear, grab my bag, grab one of the smaller bombs, and stick it inside its guts. Then I squirmed out from under whilst it was distracted trying to fish the device out, lurched to my feet, grabbed my captain and hurled us both bodily into the now-open doorway of the entry hall.

And then I could add hot splinters and stone chippings to the list of objects Luna would be fishing out of my butt cheeks and spine with tweezers later.

'Why is it people keep trying to drop buildings on my head?' The captain yelled into my right ear. Since my head was pounding I just wanted him to shut up. Plus - more important things to worry about. Like the uniformed troops running around, weapons ready and busy rounding up the assorted dial-heads. And leading the charge, two familiar figures - hulking bastards in SDF blues - both six foot four in their socks - one fair haired and clean shaven, the other dark haired and sporting one seriously impressive lip ferret.

There was no sign of Admiral Ersatz.

'Dan! Hank!' I waved cheerily. 'Good of you to drop in…' Hank Douglas charged over and helped me to my feet, his partner in crime held out a hand and hauled the captain to his. 'Well… isn't this embarrassing?' I chirped. 'Normally we're rescuing you guys…'

'Ichimonji. Douglas.' Harlock's greeting was a little more curt. Colonel Ichimonji loomed over him and offered his support to my rather battered captain. Darker haired than the captain, and broader as well as taller, but you could tell they were related. Just something in the eyes, as well as the similarity in looks. Harlocks breed true, I'm told - but two types: one kinda mousy and quiet like the captain, the others darker and taller (and if you ask me, a wee bit nastier. Just look at the captain's brother…). From what I've been able to gather Dan's grandad and the captain's great-grandad were brothers - our old captain's boys.

'Next time, switch the damn transmitter off earlier.' Dantetsu Ichimonji scowled down at my poor captain. 'If Emeraldas hadn't overheard one of the snatch squads talking, we'd still be a couple of hours out.'

'Can we save the "I told you so's until after we've mopped this mess up?' The captain was looking more than a little ragged - scruffy, blood-soaked, bruised, cut, burned… 'I got the information I came for - now I just want the bastard behind this.'

'In that state?' Dan looked him up and down and shook his head. 'You're a mess - and how long since you got any sleep?'

'Too long,' I piped up, from where I leaned against Hank's nice, broad, comfortable shoulder. The room was spinning alarmingly when I moved. 'But he's right - we do need to get this bastard.'

'He's the key - and not just to this smuggling racket.' The captain pulled free of his cousin's helping hands, Too proud, that's his problem. Me, I'd be more than happy to lean up against the nice blond tree-trunk next to me for as long as I could, clutching my little bag of goodies in a bloody hand. 'We were right about the connection to this trafficking ring. They have a nice sideline in some very nasty habits.'

'If he's here, we'll mop him up with the rest - nothing will get past the cordon I've set up. You know,' Ichimonji glared at my captain. 'Just occasionally you could just let me do my job. Instead of running in half-cocked and shooting the place up.'

'Now where's the fun in that?' I quipped. Dan ignored me. For some reason he thinks I'm just a knuckle-headed trouble maker. 'Not this guy you won't,' I added. 'He's got some tricks up his sleeve.'

'He's a synth,' Harlock explained wearily. 'And he's operating by remote. Two bodies at least, but he can't be far away. I want him before he gets off planet.'

'Not in that state,' Dan replied. 'You're both a mess.'

'You should see the other guys,' I quipped.

'Would that be your handiwork, Jones?' he asked pithily, pointing to a couple of dismembered dial-heads. I grinned at him, enjoying the way he went a little pale. Then I caught sight of myself in one of the (still partially intact) mirrors lining the hall. Even allowing for the crazy paving look it gave my face, I was a mess - dried blood (not all mine…) matted hair, a truly awesome slasher smile and a black eye were the least of it.

I touched the bridge of my nose and winced. 'Damn. You know, Luna's gonna kill me for this - she was so proud of fixing this the last time it got broken.'

'As well as the other fifteen times...' the captain drawled. I looked him over. Cuts and bruises all over him, his face was a little the worse for wear, and the tunic top he wore was in shreds.

Dan cleared his throat. 'Get cleaned up and get something to eat. No ship's getting off this planet without the Prometheus, the Epimetheus and the Pandora spotting it. Then we can track down this mastermind you're so ready for a piece of.'

'He'll need some decent weapons as well.' This voice was female, and sauntered with exaggerated grace through the carnage with a wiggle of her hips that could make a corpse sit up and beg. Long red-gold hair fell in a shining sheet to her waist, and her red and black flightsuit hugged curves in a way that I could only dream of doing.

 _In my nightmares_ …

She was holding a double gunbelt with a shiny skull and cross bones buckle. A cosmo dragoon in one holster, a sabre rifle in the other. 'My spare,' she told the captain as she handed it over. He took it with a smile - something that looked far less scary on him than mine had.

'Where's mine?' I whined at her. She just looked me up and down and sniffed. Got a good line in derisory sniffs, that girl. 'I'm sure the SDF will sort you out.' And just like that I was dismissed.

She'd walked in with an escort - two tall young men about the captain's age: dark haired, looked as though they could take care of themselves in a fight, and wearing matching black and silver flightsuits, and as alike as two peas in a pod, although I happened to know they aren't twins - one's a year older than the other. 'Don't take it personally, Ali,' said the one on the left. 'She treats everyone who isn't mom, dad, Kei or Harlock like that.'

'Mal! Blaze!' The captain sounded happy and relieved. Huh. Never sounds that happy to see _me_ …

'Harlock. Em thought you'd need a bit of help, and we were in the area…' Blaze, the younger - and slightly shorter of the pair stepped forward. 'I'd hug… but the pair of you look - and smell - as though you've been wading through an abattoir…' He pulled a face. 'You've… erm… got a bit of intestine in your hair.'

I realised he was looking at me. 'Funny you should mention that,' I drawled back.

'They killed the prisoners,' Harlock added coldly. All five of our friends shared a look. We all know how bad it gets out here, but to come so close only to fail… it sticks in your throat. Especially when someone's done it to mess with the captain's head.

'There's some showers round the corner,' I broke in. 'We can talk whilst someone gets us some clean togs.' I turned to the captain. 'Sir?'

Hank almost choked at that and even Dan's lip twitched under that brown ferret of his. But the captain nodded, and we traipsed off. Ichimonji might be a martinet, but he was right - we did need to get cleaned up - blood soaked clothing stiffens, and it gets chilly on this planet to boot. No good if you're on a hunt. And I figured we needed to get something stronger than a cup of tea into him as well. 'You got some of that roofing tar you guys serve up on board?' I asked Hank as we walked.

'I think we can rustle something up,' he replied with a wink and a sideways glance at Harlock. 'Running on empty again?'

I snorted. 'Fumes. And I know damn well he'll be off the moment he's got some clean pants on given half a chance. Which reminds me - there's a holding cell you need to check for me - we left a synth puppet in there trussed up like a turkey - make sure it's still there, would you? This bastard's a real piece of work.' I paused, a thought percolating through my brain more slowly than SDF coffee through a filter. 'Ever known a download who could remote operate multiple bodies?'

Hank thought for a moment, eyes narrowed. 'Apart from the bitch queen herself? It's possible, I guess - but distributed consciousness isn't that common - we suspect a handful of the court can do it, but that's it. And we've had no intel that there's a court connection here. Everything you guys and Emeraldas have turned up suggests this is strictly a black-market op based around former Gaia Sanction elites and their toadies who like the good life.'

'Selling off mothballed military tech,' Harlock chipped in. We reached the showers and he stripped off so fast I swear he should have had friction burns. I didn't blame him - I couldn't get out of my filthy kit fast enough and get under a shower. The water was tepid, but I was past caring - even when I noticed Emmy hovering nearby casting a scathing eye over our manly forms. 'We couldn't figure how the hell they were getting the operating codes though - even Hoshino was drawing a blank, since most of his command structure was accounted for.'

'You figured it out?' Dan asked. He was leaning on the wall outside the wet room, long legs out in front of him, ankles crossed, just like my captain's favourite pose.

'Had it handed to me on a plate,' Harlock replied, pulling a face as he soaped his hair and watched the water run red. 'One of their capos is a recorded memory-core of a former fleet admiral - how and why the copy was made I've no idea. I don't even know if he was aware of it.'

Since he was hedging and Dan was looking as though he wanted to choke the information out of him before we all died of old age, I chipped in. 'It's his brother.'

'A _copy_ of my brother,' the captain shot back, rather snippily I thought. Well boohoo. Potayto, potahto. And I said so.

Dan turned his eagle eyes onto me, glaring at me down his beak. 'Admiral Isora?'

'Calls himself "Count Lazarus" these days,' I told him. I ignored the captain's filthy looks figuring that keeping quiet right about now wasn't an option. He could deal with me later. 'Got some kind of Hellfire Club going, in addition to the black market weapons gig - big money to be made feeding the sick fetishes of these mecha-aristos with too much time on their immortal hands, and apathetic emotional responses. Big Game hunting and interior decorating a speciality.'

'I'm getting the sit rep from my people.' Dan tapped his earpiece pointedly. 'I get the picture. You know - you two should really stand down and let us deal with this…'

I looked over at the captain, who'd stepped out of the shower and taken the towel Marin handed him. He was towelling his hair dry and trying to look as though he wasn't listening. Not doing a great job of either, truth be told. I took the towel Blaze was holding out to me when I followed Harlock out of the showers, feeling cleaner and a lot less sticky. 'He won't,' I said quietly, giving Dan what I hoped was a meaningful look. 'You should know better by now.'

Dan's people had kindly donated clothing, and by that, I mean that we were soon turned out in SDF uniforms. 'I think you outrank me,' I muttered, eyeing up the captain who had lieutenant's bars on his dark blue jacket lapels. I had sergeant's stripes on my sleeve.

'Nope. Seems about right to me,' Emeraldas said brightly as she handed the captain her spare gunbelt. 'I wanted to give you deckhand's overalls but I was overruled…'

Marin - her cousin as it happens, her mom and his being clone-sibs, handed me his. Or is that half-brother? Lar Metal family trees are complicated.

'Emmy, don't be a cow. Here, Ali. Borrow mine - you'll need the firepower.'

I took the weapon gratefully, glad of the familiar weight on my hip. Designed by the Arcadia's builder and our resident ghost in the machine, Tochiro, several of our mates had been issued with them. Not sure what the old captain would make of us making free with the armoury like that, but hey - he ain't the one who has to deal with this shit on a daily basis.

'You should sit this bit out,' the captain said softly. 'This isn't your fight…'

'Turn away boys and girls,' I told the rescue squad. 'This could get messy…' He looked at me in exasperation. The rest of them just looked amused. Eying up the assembled audience Harlock just sighed, grabbed my arm and hauled me off to one side.

'Don't make me turn that into an order,' he said quietly. I folded my arms across my nice, shiny, almost-new jacket.

'Don't make me tell you where to stick that order then,' I replied. 'I thought we had an agreement - you wouldn't pull that "this is something a man has to do on his own" bullshit, and we - the crew, that is - wouldn't call you out on it.'

'Ali -' The warning note was back, but I bulled on and ignored it.

'The Arcadia's all about freedom, right? So _you're_ free to pull the manly heroic crap and go out and get yourself killed, but _I'm_ just as free to call you a selfish prick and follow you to make sure you don't get your damned fool head off. And there ain't a damn thing you can do about it.'

I waited for a response, but none was forthcoming, unless you count him folding his arms over his chest and staring me down out of those long-lashed hazel eyes the girls go so wet for. 'And before you get dewy eyed over my self-sacrificing heroics, it's totally self-preservation. I fail to bring you back in one piece and my life won't be worth living - there won't be a rock in the galaxy - hell - in the nearest _cluster_ of galaxies, where I could hide that Kei wouldn't find me. Which I keep pointing out and you keep ignoring, risking my most precious bodyparts in utter disregard for my welfare - very bad form for a captain, if you ask me.'

No response, so I poked him in the ribs with a finger. 'Well, say something, dammit!'

He finally smiled and shook his head slightly. 'Ali… you made your point. But I meant it when I said this was personal business. Lazarus could target you just to get to me -'

'Begging my captain's pardon, but anyone shooting at him _is_ my business. After all these years if he hasn't figured out that we're all we've got and we stand together, then with all due respect he's overdue for a painful thumping as a reminder.' I had to stop for a deep breath. 'That prick ain't just _your_ problem, and he sure ain't your family anymore. He ain't been family since the first time he turned on you and tore your life apart instead of protecting you like a big brother should.' I let out the last of my breath in a self-satisfied huff and waited.

And waited. Finally he smiled. 'Did I hear you place an order for coffee?'

I grinned right back. 'They might call it that, personally I beg leave to differ. Even the sludge Yattaran brews up is better than military grade roofing tar…'

'If it's caffeinated, I'll take it.'

I waited. He waited right back. 'Aren't you going to fetch me one?'

'Get your own damned coffee you lazy bugger,' I shot back. 'If you wanted to be waited on hand and foot you should have brought your cabin boy.'

'Tadashi isn't my cabin boy,' he pointed out - again. For like the thousandth time. Who's he kidding I want to know? The kid dotes on him and is always fetching him stuff.

'So you say. Now I see a sweet, doe-eyed little ensign with your name on her over there with what looks like our rations, so be a good pirate captain and take a walk in that direction.'

His look was amused this time. 'You think I'll do a runner and take off without you anyway?'

I gave him my best beatific beaming smile. 'Never crossed my mind, sir.'

He snorted. I smirked. We sauntered over.


	10. Chapter 10

'The resemblance is astonishing.' Dan was staring at the discarded shell that Lazarus had left in our cell with interest. 'This level of detail is expensive - someone clearly wanted to make sure there was doubt as to the identity of the copy.'

I peered at the body myself, and had to agree. I'd only met the bastard once - twice if you count Kei making me pick the bugger up off the deck where he'd died and move him to our morgue so we could stick him in a torpedo tube. A cold-blooded bastard had been my assessment back then. He'd only had eyes for Harlock - the old captain, that is. The rest of us hadn't been worth more than a sneer.

The captain was standing near the door, not bothering to get a closer look. Me, I gave the limp body a kick, just to make sure. It was the least I could do - my shoulder had stopped bleeding thanks to a pretty medic, but it hurt like a sonofabitch. 'He's gone, right?' I asked the tech who was examining it. She looked up and nodded. 'Good,' I said viciously. 'Captain - are you _sure_ you're not adopted? Or he wasn't? Coz… how the hell _you_ came to be related to a prick like that…'

'Positive,' he drawled back. 'Something I think Kei worries about from time to time everytime the boys get into some hair-pulling.' He turned back to our allies. 'I think we have an answer to who's in charge of this operation.'

'It also explains how this group were able to bypass the security at the storage depots they raided,' Marin piped up. 'Hoshino's been tearing his hair out over this for two years - we just couldn't find out who they not only knew where to go for the good stuff, but how they could bypass the codes.'

'Maybe they should have cancelled his access then,' Harlock drawled, as usual having no sympathy for Admiral Hoshino's problems. Mostly because when it was obvious that the purloined ships and weaponry were heading in our - that is, colonial territory - direction - he'd shrugged, washed his hands of the matter and went back to toadying up to the new regime.

'Procedure,' Dan replied shortly. 'Your brother was listed as missing in action, not dead. Which placed him on an inactive list, not a "remove access" list. His own codes would have been cancelled, but as Fleet Admiral, he had an executive over-ride.'

'And it never occurred to anyone than a missing admiral could also be a compromised admiral?' Harlock asked, his voice dripping with sarcasm. 'I told Hoshino he was dead. I wouldn't make a mistake like that - given that I was holding Isora at the time…'

'Hoshino wouldn't believe you'd cut his head off if you held it up in front of him,' I reminded the captain. We shared a wry look. _True, dat_. _Putting the captain and Admiral Hoshino in a room together is a recipe for disaster, and even on a good day they wouldn't piss on each other if they were on fire_ … 'You got a signal yet?' I looked back down at the shell and wished I hadn't. Synths… well, technically they're classed as machine men, machinners, cyborgs.. Whatever the word of the day is. But their bodies are mostly organic. The skeleton and brain are artificial but the flesh is lab grown. So to see the tech opening up the skull and sticking wires into the exposed brain - which was a translucent pinkish-green, looked like a jellyfish - made my recent dinner of sludged caffeine and a couple of ready meals make a half-hearted bid for freedom.

A quick look over at the captain showed me that he looked a bit pale as well. Can't have been easy, watching that - I mean, for all his protesting (and the hippy haircut and the beard of stoopid) this did look like his brother.

'I have a trace on the carrier signal.' The tech looked up. She was a plain thing - mousy hair, glasses - but she did have a nice smile, and filled out her uniform nicely in the right places. I smiled back but that seemed to make her a bit nervous. 'Faint, but not too far. About five miles south-south-west.'

Hank called up a holo-map before he could be asked. 'He's heading for the civilian spaceport.' He pointed. 'Which isn't good for containment.'

'It just means _you_ can't go in after him,' the captain said smoothly. 'You still have the blockade in place?'

Hank nodded. 'Unless he wants to get shot down before he leaves orbit, he's going nowhere. But picking him up in a crowded concourse…'

The captain pushed himself off the wall he'd been leaning against, and walked over to the body. He stood over it for what felt like ages, just staring down at the face (or maybe at that flap of scalp flapping off to one side… personally that was the bit I couldn't take my eyes off.) 'You can't - you have rules,' he told Dan, looking up and looking the older guy right in the eye. You could almost see the understanding flash between 'em. Like one of the Arcadia's flashes of blue lightning, in those dark corridors late at night. 'Me, on the other hand - I don't have your scruples.'

 _No_ , I thought. _You have_ more _\- coz the military will accept collateral damage as a cost of doing business. You don't, which is one reason why you're with us, and not still wearing that shiny blue uniform and taking orders from assholes like Hoshino. However Dan can't afford the bad press if he goes off the reservation_ … I kept my trap shut. What was coming was as inevitable as a solar wind, and about as deadly. 'So we'd better get a bloody move on then, hadn't we?' I said breezily. I handed Blaze my satchel. 'Hold onto that for me, would ya? Don't drop it.'

'Some explosives left?' he asked, peering into the opening. He gave me a puzzled look when he resurfaced.

'Couldn't resist, could you?' the captain asked with a sigh. 'I ought to make you carry those things as a punishment.'

'How did you guess?' I honestly had thought he hadn't noticed that I'd picked up those two nice flourite vases.

He just looked at me. 'Really?'

I shrugged. 'Nothing on Earth will ever be the same even when it does recover. Figured a little bit of home deserved a better fate than being fondled by people who don't value anything but their own miserable existence.'

'That, I can't really argue with,' he said quietly.

See - despite his constant bitching, he _does_ get it. The little things that the rest of us hold onto. The things that ultimately stop us from thinking about a hundred very big bombs everytime our world gets tipped upside down. Luna's cats; Yattaran's plastic models; Kei's constant organising; Maji's fiddling with anything that ain't nailed down...

Just one of a hundred little things about him that are part of the reason why I almost _always_ end up with more holes in me on these gigs than he does.

* * *

'I don't see why we can't just storm the place.' Emeraldas glared through the glass doors at the concourse beyond, as though the milling throng visible through the reinforced plexi were somehow responsible for her current bad temper.

They probably were just by the simple act of breathing. She's not a people person, our Em. I guess having your father murdered in front of you and having your mother turn into an evil cyborg entity who wants you dead because she loves your twin sister best will kind of do that to you. Though Kei had it much worse as a kid and came out of it okay. _So long as she doesn't have to read you the riot act if you screw up. Or you hurt her beloved Harlock. Or threaten their kids_ …

'Because,' Harlock answered patiently, checking the energy cap in his borrowed pistol, 'if we start a shoot out, innocent people will get hurt.' He snapped the chamber closed with a flick of his finger.

Emeraldas didn't look convinced. 'Half of them are machine men. Why do we care?'

'Because people have the freedom to make dumb choices, and those are civilians. We don't target non-combatants.'

I don't know how he does it. It's all I can do not to strangle the cold-blooded little vixen some days.

'They still prey on humans for their life force. That puts them into the combatant box as far as I'm concerned.'

I couldn't fault her logic, and I know the captain feels the same way sometimes. He sighed. 'Because I said so, then. Does that work for you?'

She sniffed. 'Well you could have just _said_ that in the first place…' She pushed through the doors and strode into the concourse, the milling crowd of stranded travellers somehow sensing a predator in their midst and putting their frustration at the delays on hold long enough to get out of her way.

'Do you think she'd kill me for pointing out that she's actually much more like her mother than Maetel is?' I asked.

'I think I wouldn't want to be wearing my best flightsuit if I'm in the room when you do,' the captain replied pithily. 'I think she'd much rather kill 'em all and sort them out afterwards.'

'Better to ask for forgiveness than permission?' I quipped.

His answering smile - a twitch at the corner of his mouth - was brief. 'Have you ever known her to ask forgiveness?' It was a rhetorical question. I just grunted and checked my own gun. He holstered his pistol and placed his left hand on the hilt of the sabre on his hip. 'Ichimonji - are your people in place?'

The answer came back over our commlinks, embedded in our ears. 'If you flush him out of the building, we'll be ready. For all our sakes - _do_ try to take this outside, Harlock.'

'It's like talking to my damned father,' Harlock muttered as he cut off the connection without a reply. 'What am I? Fifteen?'

'It's your boyish charm,' I told him. He just rolled his eye at me, the right one being covered up by a white surgical patch rather than his trademark leather.

* * *

There were three staging areas. So. Emeraldas took arrivals, I got check-in and Harlock got departures. If that sounds like a lot of work for three people, searching for one face in a forest of humanity (and inhumanity) then, yeah, it might be - except for two things. We had scanners to check for the carrier frequency Lazarus was using, and Ichimonji and Hank were currently stationed in security monitoring the cameras with facial recognition.

' _What if he just dumps this body as well?' I'd asked on the way here, lounging in the comfortable seats of Ichimonji's flyer._

' _He won't,' the captain had replied rather tetchily. 'If he's left that signal on, it's because he_ wants _a confrontation. He's playing with us.'_

' _So what happened to "don't play along"?' I'd asked._

' _I said don't play_ his _game,' he'd replied, a cold little smile on his face. 'We're not. We're playing mine… He still thinks I'm Yama. He has no idea who I've become.'_

So here we were, beating the game, me and Em - if he was in our sections, our job was to flush him to Harlock. And if he was in Harlock's section, we'd be there to cut off his line of retreat. That, at least, was the plan we'd discussed.

Did we really think it would be that easy?

* * *

Step one was play spot-the-asshole. When the announcement about "unprecedented solar activity" was broadcast, there was the predictable ripple of reaction through the concourse. Annoyance, resignation, frustration, anger, tearful pleading for special circumstances… But what we were waiting for was that one single reaction from someone who'd know it was total bollocks - since anything that would scramble flight systems would certainly cut off the thin thread that connected the body Lazarus was using with his remote location. And when you combine a bollocks story you know will be seen right through, with a narcissistic cunt who won't be able to resist rubbing your nose in your thin-as-paper cover story, then you aren't going to be surprised to see his smug, smirking face staring into one of the cameras.

'He's in your section, Emeraldas.' Dan's baritone boomed over the coms. 'You know the drill.'

I waited, my eyes on the doors between the two sections. This was the hardest part sometimes. The waiting. I don't do patient. The high collar of my borrowed jacket was rubbing my neck raw, and I just had to scratch it, drawing a warning throat clearing from the tall, dark haired figure sporting an eyepatch on the other side of the concourse.

'What? We're _supposed_ to be conspicuous, remember?' I muttered into the mike.

'Yeah - well, we're up, Jones.'

Sure enough, the quarry was strolling through the doors as they opened for him, as though he owned the damn place. A few paces behind, Emeraldas was shadowing him. Lazarus moved with that easy, overconfident stride of a man who thinks he's in total control, and had that way of moving through a crowd that made them part like a shoal of herring darting away from a shark. The captain had once mentioned in passing that he resembled his mother, and Isora his father, and I wondered what the hell it could have been like growing up with two cold-blooded bastards in the household. I shivered. Kind of explained a lot about the captain when he first came on board, the poor kid.

All musings were put on hold though as I took a step forward, out of the crowd, and let Lazarus see me. Predictably, he barely broke stride, but his smirk grew even bigger. I'd heard of smiles never reaching someone's eyes, but his seemed to be refusing to even approach his mouth. Something damned unhuman moved behind those grey-blue peepers, and my own mouth was as dry as dust. He didn't even swerve, just kept heading straight for me.

Then he spotted the figure lounging against the wall, giving him just a glimpse of a tall dark haired man with an eyepatch. Just for an instant.

And he looked behind him, puzzlement suddenly replacing the smug certainty.

A couple of yards behind Emeraldas, the same figure. Collar length dark hair falling over his face, a glimpse of an eyepatch, vanishing into the crowd.

He changed direction, then, looking around with a furrow in his brow you could have planted potatoes in. But all he would have seen was little ole me - and some chick in a red flightsuit.

At least until Marin did his thing and popped out of cover near the check-in desk. To give them all due credit, the brothers were having a ball with this, and they're _very_ good at it. Rumour has it they'd been on covert ops since before most of us were getting hairy palms. So when Blaze made his move just as Marin made himself scarce, the look on Lazarus' face was priceless. From a distance, in the subdued emergency lighting we'd arranged, the resemblance was just good enough to make him sweat. Any closer or in better lighting, of course, it wouldn't take. Not with someone who knew the captain so well.

My worry about all of this, however, was that Lazarus would start shooting in the public areas. Hence our plan to try and steer him towards a less populated area - one which Dan's men, and the captain, should have cleared of civilians by now.

You know: the bits of the plan we _didn't_ talk about in the same room as an active, open comms channel buried in the jellyfish brain of Lazarus' abandoned synth body… Not that it was the only worry - if he just cut his losses and dropped this body, we'd be stuffed. Both Dantetsu and Harlock wanted him "alive", as we all wanted this arms smuggling ring rounded up and put out of business - and that went double for their vile sideline. So the captain and Blaze (coz he's almost as sneaky as his dad, Zero…) had put their heads together.

' _He always over-plans,' Harlock had said in the flyer. 'Never comes up with one strategy when three will do. You saw that during the battle for Earth.' This last directed at me, as though I'd been paying attention to anything other than my own hide at the time… 'But he doesn't think out of the box. Never has. As a kid he was the one who did what he was told. Never got into trouble. It's a weakness - he thinks of conflict only in terms of confrontation, of weapons, ships, troop and fleet movements. He didn't spot Harlock's trick weaponising the holoprojector, even though we did it twice. No imagination, really. He's brilliant within those limitations. At heart he's a bully - mean and spiteful, and whilst he can dish it out, he can't take it.' His eye had a flinty glare in it as he stared past my left shoulder, his mouth set into a harsh, pained line. 'We'll use that to level the playing field.'_

'Ali?'

I tapped my comm earbud. 'No need to shout. He's here - and you were right. This isn't the missing synth chassis from the manor - it's unmarked. You really think this is the original?'

'Might be - or else he's really playing it safe. But that flyer on the runway is registered to the consortium fronting this bunch - it has to be his way offworld.' The captain's voice sounded satisfied. 'What's he doing?'

'Got that mean, narrow-eyed, bad-smell-under-nose, am-I-being-fucked-with look on his face. Gawd… he really knows how to scowl, doesn't he? Don't he know if the wind changes he'll stay like that, as Ma Jones used to tell me?'

A laugh. 'Good. Now send him towards me.'

And this was where it got tricky. I'd much rather have got out there and tackled the bastard, but not with all these civilians around. As the captain said - we take it outside. Lazarus was trying to stalk Marin, only to keep losing him and finding Blaze popping up in places his prey couldn't possibly be getting to in the time. You could see the frustration, but like the captain said - he hadn't figured it out yet, and we kept him moving. The boys knew what they were doing, giving him exactly what he wanted to see, so when I gave them the signal, it was Marin who took point, stepped out of the shadows in just the right place to "spot" his pursuer, do a double take and quicken his pace in the direction of a side door that led to the departure area.

Lazarus took the bait, with a nasty smirk, and a hand on his pistol butt. Wearing a fleet uniform, the security had obviously let him through anyway - but they'd had their orders, and were standing down. Hell - they had enough trouble on their hands with the annoyed passengers.

I gave Marin a couple of minutes once he'd led Lazarus out of the concourse, then followed. Emeraldas followed a few yards behind. Blaze, I assumed, was nipping on ahead.

'P.A.R.T.Y. T.I.M.E.' I whispered to myself, loosening my pistol in its holster. I stepped confidently out into the now cleared departure lounge.

And stopped dead in my tracks - no pun intended - with the cold sharp edge of a knife against my throat.


	11. Chapter 11

'Careless, crewman. But then I suppose my brother doesn't keep you around for your brains.'

The knife pressed hard against my carotid hadn't broken the skin yet, but I could feel every cold steel millimeter of it, only needing the smallest bit of pressure to open up a hole that would have me dead in under minute. Seriously, I think too much about these things sometimes. 'Generally he keeps me around for my looks, charm and ability to piss off his enemies,' I replied jauntily. The blade bit a little deeper as though reminding me that a smart mouth wasn't always a smart idea. I sniffed ostentatiously. 'You know - if you're going to drool insults into someone's ear, you really ought to consider breath mints - coz, _damn_ , it smells as though something crept in there and died…' I couldn't see much in the dim light, but the smell of charred, rotting flesh was noticeable. _Well, hello to the missing asshole from the hallway_ …

'Where's Yama?' he snapped, ignoring me. You get a tough crowd, somedays.

I almost shrugged before I thought better of it. Knife to throat, an' all. 'I don't know anyone who answers to that name.'

The point of the knife dug in next to the artery, and a trickle of blood ran down my delicate, swan-like neck. 'Cute. You know who I mean.'

'No - really. I mean, there was that kid years ago - double agent? Picked him up on Heavy Meldar. Well, Kei did - she's always had a thing for that soppy, puppy-dog-lost look. Bit of a cry-baby, but a dab hand on the artillery. But honestly - I ain't seen _him_ since - oooh - must be around the time the Machine Wars began… bit of a sissy. Don't miss _him_ at all. Relative of yours, as I recall?'

'That smart mouth must get you into so much trouble,' he snarled at me.

'Oh, you have no idea…' I began brightly. 'I mean there was this time…' I gulped as the knife pressed a little harder.

'You're a pirate - why do you follow him? What coin bought your loyalty?'

'Crackers,' I replied breezily. 'Think you can match that?'

It earned me a mirthless laugh.

'I could buy and sell that phantom abomination several times over - name your price. What do you owe him? All you have to do is tell me where he is and what his plan will be.'

'You can't afford me,' I replied. 'He's my captain.'

'Everyone's for sale,' he replied coldly. 'What did you sell _your_ soul for?'

'Loyalty, courage, integrity, honour, and freedom,' I replied bluntly. 'I told you you couldn't afford me.' The knife had eased slightly and the arm pressing against my shoulder holding it there had a slight tremor in it, barely noticable. This skin-job was more damaged that he wanted to let on, so it was likely that he'd drop this body as soon as he was cornered. The trick however was to keep him occupied as long as possible without getting my throat cut - this last _not_ being part of the plan…

'Loyalty? Courage? Honour?' He sneered. We were back to hissing non-sibilants again. Seriously - it _is_ a thing; don't let grammatical pedants tell you otherwise. 'What does a pirate know of such things? The crew of the Arcadia are criminals and terrorists - the worst kind of lowlives Harlock could pick up, and I suspect Yama's taste in crew is little better.'

'Criminals and terrorists? I thought we were pirates?'

He flicked the blade away from my neck and sliced my right shoulder though the jacket. I hissed and spat out a pithy little expletive that Ma Jones would have slapped me silly for. I seemed to be doing that a lot at the moment. 'I'll have you know the captain has _excellent_ taste in men,' I added. _Wait_. 'Hang on, that came out wrong…'

He shifted the blade to dig into my cheek, which I took serious exception to. I can take holes in me in most places but there's a line. You don't threaten Little Ali, and you leave my beautiful face alone. 'A little help here?' I pleaded. 'Or are you just toasting marshmallows?'

'What the hell are you talking about?' He lifted the knife, presumably to find something else to mutilate.

'I wasn't talking to you, asshole.' I twisted and slammed my head back into where I hoped his face would be. I wasn't quite on target, and I slammed into his head somewhere near his ear, and it set my head ringing. But it did get me out of the line of fire, and a well-aimed shot lanced out of the darkness and disintegrated his head.

Blaze stepped out of the shadows, now sans eyepatch, and lowered his gun. 'You cut that a little fine,' I grumped at him.

He shrugged. 'Harlock asked me to wait - wanted the maximum amount of distraction.' He looked down at the smoking, headless corpse. 'You seemed to have the situation under control…'

'Control? I have bloody _holes_ in me. Again. He cut my face. My fucking _face…_ can you believe that? I'll give him _waiting_. Doesn't bloody deserve me, he doesn't.'

Blaze just waited, having holstered his pistol. 'You done bitching?'

I sighed. 'Yeah. I'm done. Where are they?'

He smiled grimly. 'We should get there in time for the showdown,' he said with malicious relish. I like this guy - he wouldn't be out of place on our bridge. Nice, quiet, but with a nasty streak. Just how the ship likes 'em… Guys who are nice - until it's time to _not_ be nice. And there are five more like him back home - including Marin. The others aren't fully cooked yet though, so maybe it's a bit early to tell, although the middle pair show promise. Given the family history you gotta chalk that up to nurture over nature.

 _Yeah_ … I thought, somewhat sourly. _So how do you explain Isora/Lazarus and Yama/Harlock? Or is it a case of when that Harlock blood goes bad, it really goes_ … I'd have to try and nail Tochiro down for a chat over that one. But musings had to be put aside for now. 'Where's Harlock?'

'In one of the cargo hangars.' He nudged the headless body with his boot. 'Seems he was right about this one.'

'Yeah,' I muttered, rubbing the blood away from the cut on my cheek. It didn't feel deep, and was already crusting. 'Is the other one on its way?'

He smiled grimly. 'Marin was leading it a merry dance, and Em's following on just in case. But Harlock was right - Lazarus really wants a piece of him. Is it really his brother?'

I shrugged, and wished I hadn't. All the excitement had torn the wound on my shoulder again. The dark matter in my system would heal it, sure, but slowly. And only so long as I didn't keep getting into fights. 'Now that, Blaze ol' pal, is a philosophical kettle of worms and then some. The captain is firmly in the "just memories" department. Me - I'm not so sure.'

'On Lar Metal they assured everyone soul rings ensured a full transfer of consciousness,' he told me as we ambled purposefully along the red-lit corridors.

'Maybe - I mean - how would you know? You go to sleep and somewhere something else wakes up convinced it just woke up, with all your memories - but is it really you? I mean - if you could wake the original up, would there be two? Or just one?'

'This keeps you up at night?' he asked. Over my shoulder - the undamaged one - I gave him the look.

'Hell yeah - it's not just the forced conversions that gives us the heebies. Doesn't it you? I mean - you and your family refused to support the process…'

'There's a whole lifetime of discussion in that,' he assured me.

'You, me and the captain makes three…' I muttered. Make that _two_ bottles of scotch… I heard raised voices up ahead and raised my hand to signal Blaze to pull up. He stopped next to me, pistol at the ready. I cleared mine, and with a bit more care than I'd used earlier, stuck my head around the corner.

* * *

Marin and Lazarus were facing off, pistol versus pistol, a good fifty feet between them.

'Where's my brother?' Lazarus snarled. Marin just laughed.

'Seriously? You follow me all over this complex just to ask me that?' Marin had removed his eye patch and in the hangar lights, the resemblance to the captain was revealed to be as superficial as it was - darker hair, slightly longer in the face, the nose a little beakier, the mouth narrower.

Truthfully though, when the captain moved out of the shadows to stand next to him, I did start to wonder a bit about his dad, Zero, and just how much the old captain had gotten around in his younger days… Or maybe that floppy-fringed devil-may-care look was just a thing and I shouldn't read too much into it.

'He doesn't have a brother,' the captain said coldly. He stared down the length of his borrowed sabre rifle at Lazarus. 'My brother died as we landed on Earth, over seven years ago.'

'Presumably after I was shot in the back by that pirate you now see fit to copy?' Lazarus snarled. 'What did you do - shoot him, take his ship and his crew?'

'He died. Not long after he saved Earth,' Harlock said softly. 'The Earth Isora helped to save. My brother might have been a grade-A asshole, but he died doing the right thing. And he would never, ever do what you've been doing. Selling people for torture and sport?'

'You'd be surprised what a man might do when the right leverage is applied,' Lazarus replied icily. 'I remember the fight - do all those singing your praises as a hero know you couldn't even handle a man in a wheelchair? I remember you on your knees clutching your face and snivelling, and even after that you still didn't have the balls to shoot me - just how much of a clue that I wanted you _dead_ did you need, you pathetic little cretin? You couldn't take the hint when you were offered that last mission. You certainly didn't get it when I ordered all ships to fire on the Arcadia with you still on board…'

'Perhaps you should have had the balls to simply face me and do it yourself,' Harlock snapped, and I winced. Lazarus gloated visibly at the slip in pronoun use. 'Even face to face Isora still tried to shoot me in the back.' A quick recovery, but I noticed the slight wince that told me he knew he'd slipped. 'Your memories end - when? After Harlock shot Isora?'

Silence.

'Or once I'd gotten him off the Oceanos?'

That sneering mouth flattened into a grim line. _Bingo_ … Harlock shook his head sadly. 'I didn't _like_ my brother very much, but I loved him. And you are nothing but an insult to his memory. I have no idea how the machinners got hold of the memory cube, or who had it made, but I'll make damn sure…'

'Machinners? You think the machine men are behind this?' Lazarus interrupted with a cold, mirthless laugh that sent chills down my spine. 'You damned fool - you still don't see the larger picture. Or have any idea what a hornets nest you've kicked over. My remit comes directly from Mars - and there's a new order there that despises both sides of this pathetic drama playing out in the galaxy.'

Harlock lowered his sabre and smiled coldly - and for a brief moment I saw a similarity between the brothers that I hoped desperately to unsee. _There but for the grace_ … 'Thank you. That was what we needed to know.'

Lazarus shrugged. 'What good will it do you? The planet's under an interdict - the remnants of the fleet daren't go there, and the SDF has no jurisdiction.'

'Jurisdiction?' Harlock smiled again. 'I don't think we know what that means, do we, Marin?'

Marin grinned. 'I've always had trouble with the big words...'

Blaze sniggered, and Lazarus' attention wandered in his direction He snorted when he spotted my companion. 'Another one? How many doubles do you have, Yama?'

'Enough.' Harlock's smiled warmed slightly. 'It helps to have friends. But on the subject of duplicates, I do have a question or two of my own, Lazarus.' With no warning he strode forward and launched a blistering attack on Lazarus with his sabre, a flurry of blows which the bastard only just fended off with his own blade. Huh. I'd heard about those extendable sabres - never actually seen one in action before. But the captain seemed to have expected it, because he didn't seem surprised by it. But his initial attacks were parried easily, and then it seemed Lazarus had the upper hand, as he launched a series of fast, hard blows of his own, almost knocking the captain's blade out of his hand.

I stepped forwards, and felt a small hand on my arm. I almost jumped out of my skin before realising it was Emeraldas, sneaking around as silently as a cat. 'Damn it!' I began.

'Leave it,' she told me, in her cold little voice. 'Harlock has a plan.'

'Yeah? What? Get killed?' I was no expert on sword fighting. Hell - the gravity sabre seems a bloody stupid weapon if you ask me - if you've got the advantage of distance and can just shoot someone, why not do it? Plus - swords - they're a weapon with only one purpose: to kill a man. Everything else we ever invented can be used to hunt, or farm. But not a sword. It's a killer's weapon. Never liked 'em. Knives now… if I have to get up close and personal, a knife suits me just fine. And you can even trim your toenails with it after, if you're careful.

Now I've seen the captain fight - but usually against someone who uses a similar style. He's slim, light, fast on his feet and he keeps moving. That's how both Kei, and later Selen, taught him. Against Lazarus however he was up against a heavier, taller (and to my untrained eye stronger) opponent, and it looked as though Lazarus had him on the back foot after that initial attack.

'Don't panic,' Blaze whispered near my ear. 'He knows what he's doing. He's testing Lazarus - for all the power of those blows, none of them is close to doing any real damage, and any time now Lazarus will realise it.' He paused. 'His footwork's dreadful though. His power's all through his torso, he doesn't move as much as he should…'

He sounded puzzled, but I smirked. 'Coz he's forgotten that he's not in a hover chair,' I whispered back. 'He was crippled when he was nineteen…'

Yeah - something the captain hadn't forgotten, because now I knew what to look for, I saw it. If I ignored the clashing swords and the sizzling hum when their gravity fields meshed, and watched their bodies, it was obvious - Lazarus was stiff from the waist down, where the captain was dancing around him like a gazelle, staying just out of reach, and encouraging Lazarus to commit to ever bolder attacks, which he evaded neatly seemingly just in the nick of time.

'Come on, come on,' I muttered, my hand hovering over the butt of my pistol. 'Take your own advice and stop playing with him…'

And as if he heard me mumbling to myself - hardly likely, mind you - just like that the tide turned. In the blink of an eye the captain's posture changed, and his sword flicked out with precision to send Lazarus' blade flying off into a corner. The tip of his blade now rested against Lazarus' throat, and the smile on Harlock's face was so cold I had to swallow hard. He's so amiable most of the time that it's easy to forget he earned his inherited reputation the hard way over the years.

Lazarus relaxed though, the smile of a man who doesn't think he's in any danger playing over his thin mouth.

The captain's blade swept away and out in a tight, shallow curve, and sliced across Lazarus' face from the bottom of his left cheek, across his nose and into his right eye.

Lazarus collapsed onto the floor screaming and clutching his face, and all the captain did was flick something off the tip of his blade into a corner, where it landed with a wet _plop_ , then turn on his heel and walk away. He stopped next to Marin. 'He's the original - make sure Colonel Ichimonji takes good care of him.'

He walked over to where I was standing with Blaze and Emeraldas. With a warm smile he handed the sabre back to Emeraldas. 'Thanks for the loan.'

She smiled back at him. For some reason, him she likes. 'You could have cleaned it first,' she muttered as she took the gun belt from him. The pistol he kept for now. He looked at me and my open jaw must have been a sight.

'Relax, Ali - I knew what I was doing.'

'You could have told me!' I screamed in his face. But he just stood there and ignored my panicked histrionics with his usual aplomb.

'I needed to be sure this wasn't another puppet. The time delay in his speech wasn't enough - but pushed in a head-to-head fight…'

'That wasn't the plan.'

He patted me on the shoulder. Patronising arse. 'I improvised.'

'My arse did you. I saw your face when you sliced his open and poked his eye out. You planned that all along...'

Marin, I noticed, had a bloodied Lazarus in cuffs by now. Blaze muttered something about helping his brother and Emeraldas shrugged and followed him, as usual not really bothered by the macho posturing. But the captain didn't say anything, although he did run his finger over his own scar when he thought I wasn't looking. _Yeah… that had been a long time coming_ …

He did sway a little though, and I had to offer a timely shoulder, wincing as his weight landed on my damaged one. He hadn't had it all his own way in that fight, and Lazarus had, I noticed, landed some nasty blows. His left arm was bleeding and hanging limply.

'You do know I'll catch hell for this,' I told him as I helped him over to a convenient conveyor belt, currently at a standstill with a pile of luggage on it. 'You have holes in you. I have holes in _me_ , more importantly. And what the _hell_ are we going to tell Kei?'

I got him seated, where he sat with his hands in his lap as I ripped apart a nearby backpack and rummaged around for something to use as a bandage. Someone's chiffon nightdress tore easily into strips, and I wound one of them around his arm.

'Maybe nothing?' he offered eventually, with a wan smile. 'I mean, what happens on MetaBloody…'

I scowled at him as I tied off my makeshift bandage. 'Oh… this is going to be Grand Technologia all over again isn't it?' I growled at him. 'I still have the scars from that one…'

'As I recall we ended up against a wall in an alley on that job as well,, he pointed out.

'Yeah… you had your tongue down my throat that time _as well_ ,' I reminded him. 'At least this time you kept your hands to yourself…'

'Those bounty hunters meant business…'

I hate it when he's being reasonable. And right. 'Yeah… well, for the record, yer still grabby,' I told him with a leer. Just as Dantetsu walked past, giving us a weirded out look that suggested he'd heard waaaay more of that little exchange than he was comfortable with. The captain obviously noticed it too, coz he gave me that secretive little smile he has that told me we'd get some serious fun yanking the colonel's chain on the way home.

I settled back against a large suitcase and sighed, as we watched Selen's boys and our SDF pals haul Lazarus to his feet and out to a waiting transport. With any luck he'd be rotting in an SDF prison for a long time.

I sighed again, and watched out of one heavily lidded eye as the captain settled back against some convenient luggage and closed his eyes. Yeah. Home sounded really good about now.

* * *

No, of course he didn't stay caught… But that's a story for another day, and I wasn't there for that one… but I did get part of the story from Mamoru, who was on Herise with his parents for that mess… One day I hope to pry the rest of it out of the tight-mouthed little sod…


End file.
